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- One Blue Star
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- Author: Mindy Phillips Lawrence
- Reviewer: Sonali T. Sikchi
- Publisher: Red Engine Press
- Format: Adult, Poetry, Paperback, 68 Pages, 2004, $9.95
- ISBN: 0974565253
- Rating: * * * * Quills
- www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0974565253/scriquil
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- Till I read Mindy Phillips Lawrence's work, I remained convinced that the art of evocative, multi-layered poetry died with the Romantic Poets. Lawrence has convinced me otherwise with her tour de force -- a haunting collection of poems in which every word has been chosen with care and placed just so, to create beauty in the midst of the sorrow and ravages of war.
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- Even as Lawrence prays for the star on the banner hanging in her front window to stay blue and for her soldier son to return safely home from the battlefields of Iraq, she is waging a private war inside herself for her diametrically opposing views of war. Throughout the war, she has supported the efforts of our troops while questioning why our young men and women were put in harm's way.
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- Of her soldier son Grant who was in the war in Iraq for many months, Lawrence writes, "I can't imagine the conditions he faced or the sights he saw while he was there." Her agony become especially acute when she is considered unpatriotic because she opposes the need for war. In the poem "Don't Call Me Names," she grapples with her despair when her being an American, which she considers to be an unalienable right, is being questioned.
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- The stark horror of the battlefield is brought home to us by the spare poem "Media War," which describes the fate of an embedded journalist. It highlights the casual careless cruelty of war where human life is cheap. Soldiers make fun of horrific things, like the hand lying beside the road in the poem "The Handshake," to relieve the unrelenting stress of mind-bending sights.
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- In the poem "The Reservist," Lawrence talks about the attractive but false recruiting strategies employed by the armed forces for kids in high school. The lure is "a few weekends for money for college, maybe a car." Well, reality is far more brutal: repeated protracted dangerous assignments in a foreign land in the thick of combat with a high risk of fatal injury, only to return home to: no job, few friends, possible disability and a government who pays scant attention to the sacrifice performed on their orders.
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- The poem "Babylon is Falling" is an historical detour to the cradle of civilization to give a sense of the number of human souls who have passed through the land, in whose footsteps our soldier are now following. It establishes a connection with the humanness of the Iraqi people, rather than the daily vilifying of them by the media.
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- Whenever I hear reports of war on the radio or the television, Lawrence's words from "Embryo" never fail to surface to the consciousness: "Out again, / Into the light of day and beyond. / I stagger, trying to reason why / Man solves problems this way." And from "Convincers": "We fight to sustain our beliefs. / What if others differ? / Do they not believe as well?" The poem "Caste" holds the president accountable for choosing the death of thousands of American and Iraqi citizens. Was their sacrifice worth it? Lawrence's silent question leaps off the page.
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- In the poem "Worth Fighting For," Lawrence reminds us all of the problems indigent to our country that don't require guns, but are in dire need of minds, words and diplomacy. Those are the problems of poverty, illiteracy and racial discrimination, to name a few. Lawrence laments, "Is it not patriotic to give to your country by laying down your gun / To attack the things worth fighting for?"
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- After reading every poem, I paused to draw in breath after painful breath as I struggled to assimilate all the emotions that Lawrence drew out of me with her sensitive and poignant writing. With her poems, Lawrence has captured my thoughts and feelings -- even the elusive ones I had not been able to express.
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