American Life in Poetry: “Armed Services Editions”

During World War II the government endorsed the publication of inexpensive paperbacks for people serving overseas. Jehanne Dubrow, who lives and teaches in Maryland and whose husband is a naval officer, here shows us one of those pocket-sized volumes. This poet’s latest book is “The Arranged Marriage,” (University of New Mexico Press, 2015).

Armed Services Editions

My copy of The Fireside Book of Verse

is as the seller promised – the stapled spine,

the paper aged to Army tan – no worse

for wear, given the cost of its design,

six cents to make and printed on a press

once used for magazines and pulp. This book

was never meant to last a war much less

three quarters of a century.

I look

for evidence of all the men who scanned

these lines, crouched down in holes or lying in

their racks. I read the poems secondhand.

Someone has creased the page. Did he begin

then stop to sleep? to clean his gun perhaps?

to listen to the bugler playing taps?

Poem copyright 2015 by Jehanne Dubrow, from Bellevue Literary Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2015, and reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by the Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited submissions.