Reviews
What others are saying about GROUP SHOT:
“These are poems of witness written by a man driven to witness, to remind the country what it never wanted to know when it was happening and what it forgot or comfortably mythologized when it was supposedly over….there is a tension between the elegiac, graceful language of many of the poems and the ugliness of what they describe that is powerfully transformative….the aching beauty Paquet creates in these poems is born from the need to not only tell truth, but to share it experientially through art, to allow us to feel it in our hands and guts and hearts, to know in our senses how the war looked, smelled and tasted and felt, and to know in our conscience what wisdom we might choose to take from that knowing.”
Wayne Karlin, novelist, poet, essayist, editor, author of Drinking with the Enemy, and winner of the Vietnam Veterans of America Excellence in the Arts Award.
“Back in 1972, when the first-ever-of-its-kind Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans was published, Basil Paquet was clearly far and away the most accomplished poet in the book. But soon after it appeared, Paquet disappeared from the literary landscape, as far as I know never publishing another poem thereafter. Until now, that is. Fifty-four years later, Paquet has finally put together his own collection of poems. Many of those older poems are included, but most of the poems in Group Shot are published here for the first time. I am really happy Paquet has reappeared, and I’m really happy to have these poems.”
W. D. Ehrhart, poet, essayist, editor, and author of Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems
“Writing meaningful poetry requires a devotion to language, a deep empathetic dive into the lives of others, and a skill at using words to activate all the senses. But it also requires a knowledge of one's readers and what they might bring to a particular poem from their life experiences. Basil Paquet excels in all these categories.
As a veteran of the war in Vietnam myself, Paquet's constant use of 'nam terms and acronyms resonates with me and makes his poems that much more meaningful. If you're not a member of that audience, the poet has provided a comprehensive glossary at the end of his book to help you navigate through some of his poems. But, to his credit, his language does not exclude others from experiencing the true depths of war. His imagery and clarity follow a beautiful rhythm that makes his work accessible even to my high school and college-age granddaughters, to whom I will be sure to give copies.
Please buy a few copies of this profound collection -- one for yourself; one for your public library; and one for your children's school library. Now, more than ever, Americans need to know at the deepest levels what waging war in their names entails. Statistics and abstract theories, not to mention the euphemisms that the government employs to sell its wars, will not do. People need to feel war at its greatest depths. Basil Paquet’s poems will take you there.”
Doug Rawlings, Co-founder of Veterans for Peace, author of In the Shadow of the Annamese Mountains and other works.
“If you read just one book of poetry in 2027, make it this one. Group Shot is stunning and extraordinary. I wept to read it; the combination of the agonizing subject matter, and the beauty of the language is devastatingly powerful. In this cohesive collection of narrow-lens, concretely detailed, lyrical poems, Basil Paquet illuminates the experience of the Vietnam war the way “tracers rip through ... black plumes.” Paquet revisits the conflict which tested the conscience of America, shadowing the reader through intimate death, quirks of fate, and an exquisite natural landscape. In language frankly personal and richly beautiful, these poems gaze into the confluence of rivers where “the waters of memory and oblivion braid.” With “distance...between us and the hell we summon” Group Shot timely invokes the profound implications of unleashing dogs of war—then and now.”
Cindy Ellen Hill, poet, editor, musician, attorney, and author of Leeds Point
“Group Shot documents the American War in Vietnam and its aftermath, almost entirely in a highly sensory, often unspeakably violent present tense, punctuated by moments of attentive, quiet beauty. Paquet’s carefully crafted immediacy reminds me how history is always with us, and that abstractions such as war, time, and courage, as well as imperialism and resistance, exist in individual, bodily experiences—the moments, lifetimes, and deaths of people: “Lift an injured man,/ you feel their wounded/ limbs shift for balance;/ even unconscious/ they'll help you/ fight to save them.” In the midst of genocidal, bewilderingly dishonest, hyper-capitalist rule, I find the deeply moral, humane, and unromanticized truth of these poems to be urgently welcome.”
Jonathan Andersen, poet, educator, author of Stomp and Sing, The Burden Note, and Augur
