Cover Art: NASA imagery; cover designed by Christopher Gendron
The Nemo Poems: A Martian Perspective
by Rodger Martin
The Nemo Poems: A Martian Perspective
Poems from the Vietnam Ware; perspectives from time and distance. We like to think we have come vast intellectual and emotional distances from our ancestors, and yet, when the face of death confronts us, we feel--if not see--how little we have changed from those ancestors and how tiny a piece of the universe within which we actually exist. It is at that moment when poetry and story become the umbilical making survival worthy of the effort to survive.
And so it is with Nemo, a boy turned soldier searching the planet in hopes of understanding his childhood losses and discovers only more loss until he unexpectedly senses another, even more ancient stranger who has fled his own world of war and loss. They both begin to understand that if they are to heal, the old aphorism “Home is where the heart is” must become a two-way street which embraces “Heart is where the home is.”
The ancient, elder veteran realizes that only by serving as a guardian of his younger veteran's emotions, they both might keep their hearts and eventually find their way home--that place where like Tolstoy's Pierre Bezukhov and Homer's Odysseus--they might finally bury their oars.
Praise for The Nemo Poems: A Martian Perspective
The Nemo Poems is a remarkable collection of powerful, world-spanning writing . Moments, places, ideas, and images are placed in unexpected but meaningful conversation. The emotional and intellectual depth to these pieces moves and impresses. “I dream/I stand with all the dead of all wars/ buttressed against my knees …” is just one of many lines that stays with me. —Brinda Charry, author of The East Indian - A Novel
The Nemo Poems rake through a world and a cosmos to find fragments to shore against our ruin. Rooted in the Vietnam horror but transcending that grim era, these poems speak to our current state of urgency with a finely tuned poetic that melds art, myth, and a Martian perspective on our history. Enhanced and enriched, this new version of Rodger Martin’s first book is even more relevant to our times, and an elegant read. —William Doreski, author of Cloud Mountain
Martin’s lens on the American war in Vietnam is unique and devastating. He portrays two opposites of a combat engineer’s experience, both the daily horrors of actions, and the heartbreaking beauty of the landscape. Martin’s elegiac poems use metaphors of Vietnam’s natural world, such as the lizard and its prey, the cicada. The 19-year old hero, Nemo, is the cicada. But even when a chopper medevacs him out, what he sees is the moon illuminating the jungle. “His fear of falling lost itself in the beauty below.” —Terry Farish, award-winning author of The Good Braider, and Flower Shadows, a novel set in the war in Vietnam
