Full Moon Boat: Poems Paperback - 2000

From the rear cover

"These poems break open the heart, so we can weep in compassion for all our lives. Fred Marchant teaches and awakens the soul. The reader will finish Full Moon Boat an enlightened being."--Maxine Hong Kingston

In 1970, during the war in Viet Nam, Marchant became one of the first Marine officers ever to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector. In these poems, Marchant explores the concept of violence: What are its origins and consequences? What actions of the heart and mind resist it? Marchant takes us on a voyage from childhood to adult trauma, and eventually to a peace arrived at by unflinching meditation. A hard-won peace, it is our undiscovered country.

"There's a wonderfully wide, essential music here in the voice of Fred Marchant, a fluency of spirit, both delicate and firm. 'I was pure listening in training' he writes, in the remarkable 'African Violents, ' and that, in fact, is precisely the spirit of listening conveyed to readers--open-hearted, full-bodied, deeply sung."--Naomi Shihab Nye

"I love the luminous, tough integrity that distinguishes these poems as they move--buoyant and perfectly balanced--between their given and chosen worlds. In its lyrically plain-voiced, honest cadences, Full Moon Boat is that rare thing, a book of wisdom."--Eamon Grennan

Fred Marchant is the author of Tipping Point, which won the Washington Prize in poetry. He is a professor of English and the director of creative writing at Suffolk University in Boston, and he is a teaching affiliate of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Media reviews

Citations

• Publishers Weekly, 10/30/2000, Page 73