Tongue of War from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki

Tongue Of War is one of the most distinctive manuscripts I have ever judged for a book prize (and it is a book rather than simply a collection)." Barnstone writes that he intends TONGUE OF WAR as "a love letter to the World War II generation." But he explains, "I see the sequence as a history in verse in which I allow the readers to inhabit multiple and warring perspectives on the War in the Pacific, including the Pearl Harbor attack, Hiroshima, and the conflict in between." Pulitzer-prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler writes that "Barnstone has revealed humankind's capacity both for evil and for redemption with a power that few writers have ever achieved."

This book, which won the John Cairdi Prize for Poetry, selected by B. H. Fairchild, is inspired by historical situations and accounts letters, oral histories, news reports, etc., of individuals from both sides of the Pacific theater of World War II, including the home fronts. Barnstone writes that he intends Tongue of War as ''a love letter to the World War II generation.'' But he explains, ''I see the sequence as a history in verse in which I allow the readers to inhabit multiple and warring perspectives on the War in the Pacific, including the Pearl Harbor attack, Hiroshima, and the conflict in between.'' Pulitzer-prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler writes, ''Barnstone has revealed humankind's capacity both for evil and for redemption with a power that few writers have ever achieved.''

In this collection, Tony Barnstone explores the events of World War II in the Pacific from both sides of the conflict. As his poem "Hindsight" puts it, "Seems everyone has points of view / but no one has perspective."

Juxtaposing the voices of many different participants-from American GIs to Japanese doctors, from Navy nurses in the Philippines to housewives in Tokyo, from scientists building the bomb to the ones who survived it-Barnstone evokes the brutality and banality of war as others might have experienced it. He mines letters, interviews, oral histories, and personal conversations for other people's memories of what it was like to be, say, a kamikaze pilot in Okinawa or a crewman on a burning ship in Pearl Harbor.

Themes of fire and water run through many of these retrospective poems. Oxymoronic images such as the "flaming lake" of Pearl Harbor or the "black rain" that fell like wet tar in Hiroshima fit with his use of opposition and contrasting points of view.

There are many who believe that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in fact know the attack was imminent. However at the time the USA was in an isolationist frame of mind and wanted no part of the conflict in Europe. This after the great loss of American lives in World War I; there were more than nine million soldiers and civilian deaths in that conflict on both sides.

After World War I the United States had become a country without a moral compass its citizens were only interested in their ...