Review: Capturing the Dead
Capturing the Dead
Daniel Nathan Terry
NFSPS Press
2008
Winner of the 2007 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition, Capturing the Dead is everything that its title implies: a journey, an expedition, a search for phantasms and specters that, ultimately, allows us to bring home lost souls and forgotten spirits, to capture them, one by one, even as they seem to capture us.
Historical persona poetry is a unique and, in the proper hands, wondrous thing. Much in the way that historically-based fiction allows us to traverse time and move about the bones of a specific time period, historical persona poetry affords us that same ability to overcome the laws of time while, simultaneously, allowing us the unique expansiveness and musical prosody that is the sole realm of high-class poetry.
Capturing the Dead is a journey into America’s Civil War as seen through the eyes of soldiers, slaves, early photographers and even the battlefield. The depth and richness of the ensemble cast here gives Capturing the Dead a candid, honest, documentary feel that few other poetry collections have been able to achieve. The language is as exact as a surgeon’s scalpel.
What makes Capturing the Dead unique among the world of poetry collections is its ability to be inclusive of so many times, places and personae while not losing focus or development. The collection’s “central” character, a soldier named Noah Williams, serves as our Virgil along this road which, as wars can, becomes hellish at times. Noah’s plight is harsh and painfully palpable, becoming more familiar and relatable with each passing poem. Through his eyes we witness a country divided and, more frighteningly, we see humanity at its most atavistically savage.
But this dark and bloody side of human nature casts no limitations on the ability of Daniel Nathan Terry to convey the journey with elegant prosody, musical diction and, at times, shocking beauty. Whether we are watching Abraham Lincoln prepare to be photographed by Civil War photographer Matthew Brady or traipsing alongside burial crews who comb the abandoned battlefields collecting the leftovers of war, Terry bring the Civil War knocking at our front door in expert fashion.
Overall: 5 out of 5
You’ll like this if you’re interested in: persona poetry, historical poetry, Civil War, photography, war poems
Where to find it: Amazon.com, the publisher: www.nfsps.com/publications and the poet’s website: www.danielnathanterry.com
Sample from Capturing the Dead
The Battle of Fredericksburg – December 13, 1862
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”
— General Robert E. Lee
.
In the cold of November the Union army
arrives at the rain-swollen banks of the Rappahannock,
ahead of the pontoon bridges Burnside ordered
for the crossing. He fears the depths, the slow,
but deadly current. Rather than risking his men,
he waits for nearly one month until the bridges arrive.
One month for Lee to discern his position, to gather
reinforcements. By then the rebels are too well
dug in, impossible to dislodge even for the great black cannons
of the North. The Union soldiers send wave after wave of men
across the fields where they are cut down like autumn grain
by the rebels who hide behind the stone wall that flanks
the sunken road. The battle ends with a whimpering retreat,
with more than twelve-thousand Union casualties.
Pinned down by Confederate artillery, they lie
where they fell. Dead horses dot the landscape like dark
boulders. The fields echo with moans, the guttural
blood-cough.
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