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BOOK.5
103
and a three-dollar box of Milk Duds.
Since ?Saving Private Ryan,? bravery in combat has been extolled as the sine qua non of patriotism. It is not. Patriotism is the acquired devotion to an abstraction?the nation?while bravery under fire is personal and instinctive. The soldier who falls on a hand grenade, giving up his life to save the men in his squad, is a hero, but such a split-second impulse is unpremeditated, not rational. Virtual patriotism demands the creation of heroes. Yet heroes, Samuel Hynes has written, create a problem: ?They stand too close to the center of war?s values, and whether they mean to or not they act out the mottoes on the flags and the slogans on the posters.?
Before Wilfred Owen was killed, in the last week of the First World War, he tried, in a letter to his mother, to describe no man?s land, separating the trenches of the warring armies. ?It is like the eternal place of gnashing of teeth,? he wrote. ?It is pock-marked like a body
of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer... uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.? No mottoes, no flags, no slogans, no posters. No unchallenged cinematic or op-ed evocations of better men in a better time. In Honolulu last summer, my wife and I visited, for perhaps the twentieth time, Punchbowl, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, the final resting place of thirteen thousand dead of the Pacific war. Punchbowl is a place of tears and bright, sunlit silence, an extinct volcano with the graves evenly spaced around the crater. When we visit, there is usually something new, unexpected, or wrenching to see. Twenty-eight years ago, I remember a Vietnam funeral, with a flag-draped coffin, an honor guard, taps, a rifle salute, and a mother, a father, and a sister over from the mainland to bid farewell to son and brother. On this July day, it was a row of graves with stone after stone bearing a simple inscription: ?Unknown?December 7,1941.? ?
LYRICISM UNPLUGGED
A dazzling American poet comes to the fore. BY DEBORAH GARRI50N
I
isn?t often you come across poetry that makes you want to turn to the stranger next to you on the bus, grab him by the collar, and say,
?You have to read this!?
But that?s how I felt when I read a small poem called ?96 Van-darn,? in Gerald Stern?s ?This Time: New and Selected Poems? (Norton; $27.50). It begins,
?I am going to carry
my bed into New York	Gerald Stern
City tonight /complete with dangling sheets and ripped blankets; /1 am going to push it across three dark highways/or coast along under 600,000 faint stars.? Born in Pittsburgh in 1925,
Stern, the son of Eastern European immigrants, is the kind of poet who sleeps on the fire escape to wake to the
smell of roasting coffee and the sound of garbage grinding, and roams down to Rivington Street to sing songs in front of the Romanian Synagogue, like ?a walking violin, screeching/a little at the heights, vibrating a little / at the depths, plucking sadly on my rubber guts.? He has a gift for self-examination that never feels self-cen-tered, and an infectious lyricism. When he opens a poem with the request ?Let me please look into my window on 103rd Street one more time,? you want, despite the melodrama, to look with him??without crying,? as he specifies, ?without straightening the tie, or crumpling the flower.? Stern fetch-
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