Bøger af Jim McGarrah

The poems included in the poetry collection reveal the subtle sense of the mystery, beauty and love for the elemental simplicity of life. . In these poems, we find how the poet withdraws from outer experience to concentrate on the inner. These poems are full of amazing and deep imagination. It is evident that in all these poems there is present a rich style and a variety of melodies to attract the readers. BIOJim McGarrah is the author of ten books. Running the Voodoo Down won the Elixir Press Poetry Prize in 2003. His newest collection of poems, A Balancing Act, was published by Lamar University Press in November of 2018. A memoir of war entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace (Indiana Historical Society Press) won the national Eric Hoffer Legacy Nonfiction Award in 2010. Blue Heron Book Works published McGarrah's newest nonfiction book in May, 2017 entitled Misdemeanor Outlaw. His poems and essays have been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Barcelona Review, Bayou Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Collateral, December, Innisfree, North American Review, and Southern Indiana Review among others.

Jim McGarrah was born into the halcyon bubble of post-World War Two small town America, a bubble burst by the trauma of the Vietnam War in which he fought as a marine. His recall of his youth in Princeton, Indiana will take you through the looking glass of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover. His recall of a nighttime patrol in the MeKong Delta rice paddies will make your hair stand on end and bring you to tears. Misdemeanor Outlaw is a split personality of a memoir: part anecdotal paean to a seeming Paradise Lost, part wised-up epiphany about how things really work. It is a read you will come away from questioning even what you are most fond of.

Memoir of a Vietnam Vet who returns home and tries to find his bearing, but butts heads with his father and friends and falls into a career of horse training.

In Jim McGarrah's third poetry collection, the present is often eclipsed by the ghosted past of Vietnam. These vital poems dwell in the inevitable privacy of being human, and it is in these starkly singular spaces-walking the dog, truckstopping for breakfast, closing the bar at 2 am, visiting Vietnamese children suffering the effects of Agent Orange-that McGarrah wrestles truth with music, grit and wry humor. As the poet sways between sobriety and stupor, bearing witness to the horror of being alive and the horror of going on, he too leads us through that slim midnight portal into rugged grace, where a worn ball cap becomes a whiskey-washed Eucharist and the cast of the missing creates the genius of absence. When transcendence comes, it is no lavish exaltation, but something far more real and astonishing.

Jim McGarrah's The End of An Era is an insightful, heartbreaking and, at times, hilarious account of his struggles as a veteran in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In his extraordinary wounding, healing blues song, this combat veteran sings for family, for lovers, for friends, and, always, in each line, for the soldiers gone in another era and the ones now dying in our own.