Adam Gilbert's study of the soldier poetry of the American war in Vietnam is predicated on the idea that this extensive literary production should be looked at as an important testimonial source about the material conditions of the conflict, its ideological premises and implications, and its legacy; in particular, the poetry under consideration is seen as both an articulation of and a prompt to consider the moral dilemmas inherent in this fraught military enterprise. The soldier poets included in the book are to be understood as rebels in the Camusian sense of the word, in their dual rejection of violence and attendant affirmation of our shared humanity. They are writers who have accepted the ethical responsibility to bear witness to the extreme physical and psychological brutality of war; for this reason, Gilbert concentrates exclusively on soldiers directly involved in combat, men for whom killing and being killed were real, ever-present possibilities. This accounts for the notable omission of John Balaban's work, or indeed of any female voices. Unsurprisingly, W. D. Ehrhart is the most frequently mentioned author: his own production and assiduous efforts in promoting the writing of other soldiers would be reason enough for that. Gilbert supplements his discussion of the collective literary output with choice quotations from interviews he conducted in 2010 with Ehrhart and other prominent poets, including Yusef Komunyakaa and Bruce Weigl.

Given its focus on history and morality, the book is organized around four key, broadly self-explanatory, thematic clusters: “Climates,” “Others,” “Violence” and “Responsibility.” Each of the chapters opens with a brief introduction, is divided into five further subsections, and ends with a handy summative paragraph. Gilbert's considerable task of marshaling his huge range of primary sources into workable material is well served by this structure. His study is nothing if not accessible and comprehensive, and makes it easy for the reader to navigate the poetic terrain under scrutiny, and zoom in on areas of particular interest. The author's general modus operandi – also eminently reader-friendly – is to outline a pressing moral issue or a recurrent theme in the perception and conceptualization of the American war in Vietnam and then to exemplify it with a range of poetic texts.

One of the dangers of this approach is that Gilbert's impressive overview of the poetic corpus ends up covering well-trodden ground in the ideas it explores (the hostility of the Vietnamese landscape, the American soldiers’ lack of investment in the conflict, their difficulty in discerning between allies and enemies, etc.), though not in the primary sources he draws on for illustration, since those have undoubtedly been given scanter academic attention compared to narrative and cinematic representations of the war. With its ambitious, taxonomical scope, what the monograph yields in breadth it must necessarily sacrifice to depth. I would have liked for it to dwell longer on particularly accomplished and/or problematic poems, and invite readers to consider the aesthetic, as well as moral and ideological, strengths and limitations of individual texts. In fairness, Gilbert is adamant that this kind of literary analysis does not fall within the remit of his study, and he does showcase poems which challenge some of the received orthodoxies about Vietnam. Take, for example, Lamont B. Steptoe's ambiguous configuration of the earth “holding back” when being hugged by the soldiers, poised between reciprocating the embrace and offering shelter, or rather keeping to itself, in fear of or perhaps scornful towards the American enemy.

An early discussion of the soldiers’ childhood initiation to violence is the high point of the book: instead of the “John Wayne myth” (which crops up, as is to be expected, in the final chapter), Gilbert identifies a pattern of murderous games against small animals as the mark of the American Adams’ precocious fall from grace. The later claim that “the American–Vietnamese us–them barrier is frequently breached” (127) in the poetry of the war had me wish for more textual examples, and for a critical attempt to investigate the reasons for this phenomenon. This same section of the book, entitled “Breakthroughs,” is also where Gilbert singles out Weigl and Komunyakaa as interesting case studies – psychologically, if not in terms of their literariness – because of “their lack of fear and detachment” (129) for and from the Vietnamese “other.” I hope someone – Gilbert himself? – builds on the solid foundations of this study. At the end of the volume, the reader is spoilt for choice in terms of suggestions for poems to return to: Gilbert has mapped out the panorama of soldier poetry in a book full of stimuli for cultural historians and literary critics, and rich in information for the general reader.