The Death of the Scharnhorst, and Other Poems

A poet who was there at Pearl Harbor writes from the wound. These are poems born from the belly of a ship, from the black water of harbors set ablaze, from the strange quiet that follows devastation. McKillen renders the machinery of war with the precision of a man who learned it not from newsreels but from the deck of a destroyer in the hours after December 7th, 1941. The title poem elegizes a German battleship with a strange compassion, as if recognizing in the enemy a shared condition. Between the combat pieces, love poems: tender, bewildered, haunted by the knowledge of how quickly everything can be taken. This is not celebration. It is testimony. The language is stripped to its bones, stripped the way a man is stripped of everything he thought he knew when he watches his friends drown in oil-slicked water. For readers who understand that some experiences can only be rendered in verse, and that sometimes the only honor we can pay the dead is to speak their names aloud.