Valence: Considering War Through Poetry and Theory [Paperback]

In this remarkable annotated poem, Susan Hawthorne commits to words the horrors of war and dares to draw links between militarism, fundamentalism, and the sex industry. Shattering the conspiracy of silence, she rails against the violence of war and contemplates the link between place and the history of war that is infused into the earth. It is a work that looks at how war is generated and what keeps it going, asking important questions about what’s in it for those who go to war. This fresh examination that is both essay and poem combines the personal and the political, the historical and the contemporary to consider the endless cycle of war that survives on the persistence of hope—hope of an end to war and suffering. Valenceis a powerful book on a number of levels. It contains a powerful anti-war poem, rich in imagery and history, full of passion and measured anger. It also operates on a more direct level, directly confronting the culture, language and history of war. In the end it doesn’t fit well in Auden’s poetic valley – it is a work that demands to be widely read. Perhaps it should be compulsory reading in the period leading up to the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. —Mark Roberts,Rochford Street Review

“A powerful rage against the brutality and greed of war; against the particular suffering of women in war; against our indifference but more importantly, our sense of powerlessness in the face of wars most of us neither support nor would ever instigate. Susan Hawthorne’s primary companion to this rage is her grief. Here is a poet of moral conscience, in the fine tradition of Adrienne Rich, a poet writing across boundaries; striving with each form to elucidate, illuminate, change.”  —Robyn Rowland, author,Perverse Serenity“This is what a lifetime of feminism is all about finally, going out to the edge anlC&