Letters
Poetry and War

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Re: your poetry issue (Book World, April 20). The poets that seem to interest you strike me as marginalized or unpopular. I searched through the issue and couldn't find mention of my favorite. His books take up a good part of the poetry shelves in any book store. People love him.

I'm talking, of course, about Charles Bukowski, who is no self-conscious poet, waxing on about daffodils, using Latin phrases and otherwise doing his best to obscure the meaning of words.

As Buk said, the point is

to loosen up, humanize, relax,

and still make as real as possible

the word on the page, the word should be like

butter or avocados or

steak or hot biscuits, or onion rings or

whatever is really

needed. it should be almost

as if you could pick up the words and

eat them.

[From "Christmas Poem to a Man in Jail"]

--CHRIS MAYER, Gaithersburg, Md.

The editor notes:

We thank Mr. Mayer for this, especially the poetry excerpt. But Book World ran a full page on Charles Bukowski's newly released collection, The Pleasures of the Damned, along with an excerpt, in January of this year.

I don't think many would quarrel with Kai Bird's claim (Book World, April 20) that war is brutal, one theme in Max Hastings's book, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1946. Bird takes exception, however, to what he calls Hastings's point that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to force Japan's surrender.

Bird has long sought to show that Japan would have surrendered without the bombings. I was of that opinion until I read British historian Stephen Harper's Miracle of Deliverance: The Case for the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, published in 1985, which argues persuasively that the dropping of the barbaric atomic bombs gave the emperor an opening to surrender "with honor."

--BERNARD KATZ, Reston, Va.

As Max Hastings's American publisher, I was disappointed by Book World's choice of reviewer for Hastings's Retribution. Kai Bird is well-known for his opposition to the dropping of the atomic bomb, so it's no surprise that he devotes more than half of his notice to that event, even though Hastings covered it in two chapters (out of 22). And to call it the central theme of the book surely misrepresents what Retribution was about.

--ASHBEL GREEN, Knopf Publishers, New York

Kai Bird replies:

It appears that Mr. Green, a venerable editor, is piqued at himself for not saving his author from presenting his prejudices rather than scholarship. Ignoring evidence to the contrary, Mr. Hastings blithely dismisses as "peddlers of fantasies" historians who disagree with him about Hiroshima. He is wrong to assert that the vast body of scholarly literature critical of the atomic bombings has been "comprehensively discredited" -- a matter on which Mr. Green is well informed. He was, after all, the editor of Gar Alperovitz's 1995 Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, a formidable work of scholarship critical of the atomic bombings -- which has certainly not been "comprehensively discredited."