Poet eyes life in Vietnam, Big Thicket

Web Posted: 06/19/2008 05:54 PM CDT

By Robert Bonazzi 
Special to the Express-News

Coming To Terms

By H. Palmer Hall

Plain View Press, $14.95

Vietnam and the Big Thicket of Texas are worlds apart, but San Antonio poet H. Palmer Hall has been a conscientious observer and scribe in both, and these places are at the core of “Coming To Terms.” Thirty personal essays are chronologically sequenced and have the effect of a memoir, beginning in and returning to the Big Thicket in Southeast Texas.

Even before Hall became a poet, he remembers rowing a boat alone at age 7 (in his introductory essay): “Poetry is like this for me much of the time,” he writes. “I am alone in a large body of water and I put the oars in the locks and pull the water past me,” perceiving “that single moment of awareness,” when “pushing yourself and your words out there into water so deep that a single wave can drown you.”

The next 10 essays touch upon growing up in the Big Thicket — family, church, jobs, education, teaching. There's a charming portrait of his parents in “Dancing in the Thicket” and an embarrassing tale of becoming a Baptist (“Washed in the Blood”), in which Hall confesses that “I was an insufferable little prig, snotty and devout at the same time. I was, in short, a true believer and, paradoxically, proud of it.”

Hall traces his growth beyond the limitations of Texas rural culture, gradually withdrawing from religion, honing his speech beyond country music lyrics, to graduating university and becoming an English teacher, a librarian and a writer. He writes a quietly conversational prose with insight, self-criticism and truthfulness, extolling the natural wonders of the Big Thicket while criticizing clear-cutting loggers, characterizing the charm of small towns but admonishing their racism.

After these early years, there are 40 pages (of 158) about Vietnam. “I got my draft notice shortly after I quit teaching high school in 1965,” he writes “and before I got my student deferment for grad school at UT.” He could have “gotten out, but what the hell, I figured it was fate and I was so apolitical I don't recall even having thought of Vietnam at that time.” However, once he had served a year's tour — as a linguist who spoke Vietnamese but rarely leaving a large military installation — he published many essays and poems about it and was involved with veterans groups that protested that tragic, wasteful war.

What distinguishes these essays are Hall's honesty and humility about interacting with Vietnamese civilians, especially the wounded children. And also there are humorous takes about his own part in the war: “The whole time I am in Vietnam, we are mortared only three times. I get a small scratch on one of my toes ... that's it. I don't report it, don't want a Purple Heart for a tiny cut on my big toe.”

After the Vietnam section, the final third of “Coming To Terms” features a variety of essays on relationships with women — driving cross-country to end one, immersed in another while studying German and getting married and raising a family, as well as a fascinating dreamscape, “Driving Through Milwaukee,” about a city he has never visited.

Two others — “Coming To Terms with Dad” and “A True Story about an Old Woman and Poetry” — are the most tender and poetic pieces in the entire collection.

Perhaps the most stunning set of essays are Hall's walking meditations in the Big Thicket, an elegy for James Byrd Jr., who was brutally murdered in Jasper by three white racists, as well as several lovely sojourns along the Gulf Coast. Some are reminiscent of fellow Texan Elroy Bode, since both explore the natural environment with a poet's eye and an amateur naturalist's sense of ecological ethics and both are keen observers and listeners, who know the names of fauna and flora essential to delineating a deep sense of place. They would write as lucidly about Paris or Rome had they been Europeans, but they often are labeled “Texas writers” when, in fact, they are universal writers who happened to be born here.

These 30 essays were published in literary magazines and national anthologies, including “Places to Grow” in “Best Texas Writing.” A librarian and a professor of English at St. Mary's University, Hall has been a significant figure in the “poetry scene” in San Antonio for two decades as publisher of Pecan Grove Press.

Throughout this book there are single sentences and paragraphs paralleling the immediate essay with thematic anecdotes — flashbacks and reprised details from earlier essays — all weaving loose threads from the past into the present, giving readers the sense of an evolving continuum. “Coming To Terms,” which embeds a half-dozen excellent poems in appropriate contexts, tells us a poet's remarkable life story in splendid prose.

Robert Bonazzi's new collaboration with John Howard Griffin, “Available Light: Exile in Mexico,” a book of essays and photographs, has just been published by Wings Press. His Poetic Diversity column appears occasionally in the Express-News.