Remarkably, in Blood Garden: An Elegy for Raymond, Pam Bernard is able to deliver us to the Western Front, and more specifically, to the horrors of trench warfare, and tell the story of a seventeen year old New England farm boy who fought there in the Great War. She accomplishes this by staying true to a reliable narrator’s steady voice, and by building these lean poems around surprising and deeply human insights into the war that changed human consciousness.
Blood Garden: An Elegy for Raymond is a powerful and poignant prose poem. Its vivid images—both verbal and visual—pay both homage to Pam Bernard’s father, “a soldier of the Great War,” while evoking an America at the outset of its journey from innocence to engagement in the violent world of the Twentieth Century.
The American Experience in World War I
