Book Review

In the disturbance we call America, we must navigate the tension between job and home, between what we love and what we must do, to find balance if we can. And we call on our poets—who spend copious time alone—to find a footing, or more properly, a stance from which to explore, to reach into her context in unwavering language, who looks, as Mary Oliver once said of Whitman, from a thousand points of view, giving us winnowed, purified language rendered to the point of revelation. This balance is the underlying project of poet, writer, and writing professor Jehanne Dubrow’s most recent collection, Civilians (LSU Press, 2025). For in it she invokes the context of her self, parsing the influences, laying bare the tension between her own non-military life (which the OED advises is the essential meaning of civilian) and her marriage (which according to the Bible, the two become one) to a career naval officer (hence the tension). And it is in her looking, her vision, with deft care, that our poet penetrates the marriage she’s accepted and finds footing to stand. This stance affords her the ability to peer into the scenes, the dialogues, the violence vicariously felt, for better or worse. It is this acceptation that drives the volume to great art, and for that we owe her great praise.

Of course, a stance requires, at a minimum, something sturdy on which to stand, and for her platform our poet employs chronology, beginning the first poem, “What Do You Give the War That Has Everything” in Section 1, at, where else but, the beginning:

The first year, we were told, is always

the most difficult, a neutral zone

of afternoons and nights. Dear war,

we said, we are sending ourselves

folded inside gilded envelopes—

we have stamped your name in wax.

Notice that the stanzas are not composed of the speech of ease but lines, well-crafted and set like bricks, hard earned, giving evidence to the underlying tension as she struggles to understand. The poem proceeds year after year to the point of observation:

The war took anything we had to give.

Decades on, we gave emeralds for

the green of some forgotten field.

We gave the war a diamond,

to honor its cleave and glittering,

its dreadful way of capturing the light.

Along with lines Dubrow also gives us verse, a latent verse, weaving in poems with Grecian antecedents, like “The Trojan Women” and “Apologia,” that come like waves reminding us that “A War Is Forever,” making prelude to the second section, “Opening Inside Us,” composed of a Grecian titled single poem, “Metamorphose.” Divided into fifteen parts, the poem centers on both her military husband “who is, for a time one thing,/and then when the ocean withdraws/from land, he becomes a new kingdom” (p. 25), but on herself “like a curved mirror.” These are gerundive moments of Dubrow’s fulfillment of consciousness, sustained by yoking concision with a steady pace when she sinks through the myth of reality, facing the difficulties of housing both on base and close to base, describing herself as “one turned to stilled stone,” making a reality of myth. And while she, at one point, becomes more and more the unfeeling rock, he “becomes a stream,/slipping through my hands” as she listens “to his footfalls,” declaring that “He is altered,” and Dubrow, being in a symbiotic relation, cannot escape or resist the alteration:

We are flint stuck against rock.

We are every kind of water,

still pond and stream opening inside us. We are small

currents searching for the sea.

In the final section, Dubrow opens with Homer (“Some Final Notes on Odysseus”) recognizing that the poem “always ends before the peace.” The husband retired and home, she says that she is “naught and he is knot,” the line phrasing giving us an entertaining contrast, useful in its contrapositive reference by sound. Then comes the dénouement:

Now we are at home in the little nation

of our marriage, swearing allegiance to the table

we set for lunch or the wind chime on the porch . . .

My love, I am pledging

to this republic, for however long we stand,

I’ll watch with you the rain’s arrival in our yard.

We’ll lift our faces, together, toward the glistening.

I have saved for the end the title poem (or should I say poems, there are four of them). They tie together the volume like a weave, for there are things that this poet must say, not for herself but for us to understand her circumstance through her, as she “brings the war into my bed each night/and barely move beneath its trembling light.” All the while she makes her occurrent statements, “I say nautical miles. I say knots/I say mist drifting me over the steely surfaces” using the active voice, “I measured the depth between us,” leading her to what I’m tempted to call resignation, but more properly, recognition:

   Now when we touch,

I can feel his edge worn down

     and barely miss the keenness

of his mouth. I remember

     for decades he wore two tags

around his neck, one to leave

                with the body, the other,

perhaps, brought back to my hands.

The scope of the book is a lifetime, the measure of the book is life. The volume is compelling, a necessary addition to our cannon. I keep it close.