“Here is a rich example of the American voice come to body during the Vietnam War. Jaeger’s good book records a personal odyssey from that time, a poetry not lost to words but born of witness, reports from the front nurtured in the rich, observant common sense of feeling. Here is a strong, considered testimony from the boy, the soldier and the veteran of a period – an Age? – that still tests the American conscience. And something additional: War on War –the title is what and what-for. We are indicted by experience, and this is it’s honest language.”
–Marvin Bell
War on War by Lowell Jaeger has documented our time. . . . He has gone inside the feelings and thought that mark our part of the century. He makes me realize how serious and focused—and engaged—poetry can be.”
— William Stafford
“Lowell Jaeger’s poems are testimony to many aspects of war, of the Vietnam war specifically; they bring before us victims and executioners of several kinds, and reveal how enmeshed within the individuals those rules can be. ‘Some wounds,’he writes, ‘nee be/reopened/before they heal and where the living/will not speak, the dead cannot/keep still.’
“War on War does speak, in vivid and compelling ways which indeed will help in that reopening, that so necessary sense of history without which we have no hope of avoiding the repetition of grievous moral error.”
