Dec 21, 2009
“After Our War” is a twenty-five-line poem in free verse. John Balaban uses the first-person plural point of view, thereby including and implicating the reader in the horror of the Vietnam War. Although the poem appears to be one stanza, internal divisions marked by structure, sense, and tense divide the poem into three eight-line sections, followed by a one-line concluding question. The first and last lines begin with the phrase “After our war.” This phrase therefore frames the poem, returning the reader at the end of the poem to its beginning. This device...
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