Gerry McFarland's collection of nineteen intimate poems lyrically reflect on his years as a young Navy Gunner on board the USS King at the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam war. These poems illustrate Gunner's internal battle to adjust to not only a foreign country, but the incongruities of war, his longing for love and home, as well as the new and sometimes brutal realities and relationships that will echo into his future. We see Gunner play out a balancing act between reluctant sailor, manhood and human being.
The sea is beautiful and merciless, it can kill you. In Gunner this is what Gerry McFarland makes me experience: what it feels like being in a diminishing space somewhere between both curving dark ends of the world, where existence on a naval ship is a continual cycle of the mundane broken by flashes, intense moments, when life-saving decisions are made. McFarland intimately knows deployment; he knows that caring for a fifty-caliber machine gun is a maintenance ritual which is equivalent of the tedious cleansing of a sailor's soul when at sea, and it is also the sailor equivalent of being in port.
-Gary Copeland Lilley, author of The Bushman's Medicine Show
"The enemy is always invisible," Gunner is told by his Captain. "Brace yourself...." In Gerry McFarland's latest book, Gunner is constantly on alert for enemy fire, while at the same time fighting the inner battles of a young man confronted with all the incongruities of war. Gunner gets his sea legs, not only on the USS King, but in life, as he learns to hang on, keep his mouth shut, and "lean into the curve of the earth."
-Linda Malnack, author of 21 Boxes and editor at Switched-on Gutenberg and Crab Creek Review.
Gerry McFarland's Gunner is a powerful chapbook about war, disillusionment, and survival. Many images evoke a surreal feeling: "I no longer saw the light and dark of things" and "Burned mates stumble forward choking...." Other poems show the boredom of painting a destroyer's "angled fantail stripe" over and over. Gunner hears a war protester call him a "Baby Killer"-Whatever, says Gunner. He hangs out in bars, and his friend falls in love with a go-go dancer. In one poem, Gunner apologizes for not shooting; in another, he tries to die. He hears the ocean's "swells whisper like angels," and the tragedy of Vietnam is re-enacted. This skillful book has both immediacy and the right distance. It feels authentic.
-Richard Widerkehr, author of At the Grace Cafe and In the Presence of Absence.
