Entertainment, Books - Marine Corps Times

Book Review: ‘The Warrior’

The book jacket displays a subtitle that doesn’t appear on the title page inside the book: “A Mother’s Story of a Son at War.”

Yes, it’s all about her.

But not selfishly. It’s about her love for her child who is now a man. It’s about her desire to understand the soldier she unwittingly raised. And the outcome is enlightening.

Veteran Brian Turner’s 2005 book of poetry, “Here, Bullet,” takes readers to the heart of combat. Frances Richey’s book takes readers to the heart of the home front.

The tug of love starts elsewhere on the jacket: There’s a Polaroid-style snapshot of a kid with long, blond hair, a solitary figure who waves meekly. This is the image that beckons a reader to a collection that puts parenthood into poetry.

How did little Ben, who “drank milk” before he “drank blood,” grow up to be big Ben the soldier? There’s no photo of the U.S. Military Academy graduate and Army captain who served twice in Iraq, but the word portrait Richey paints is full of details about the relationship between mother and child. Her poetry is narrative and autobiographical; recall that the subtitle refers to “story” instead of “poems.”

In 33 poems, Richey tells the story of a single mother and her son.

There’s high school: “I believed if I was present/ for his football games/ he wouldn’t get hurt.” The message? If only she could be in Iraq to protect him in battle.

There’s graduation at West Point, where a flock of barn swallows captures her eye when it “arrived out of nowhere,/ the way my son was suddenly a man.” The message? Children grow up and remain a part of you but are apart from you.

“He has another life/ where he stuffs a plug of tobacco/ inside his cheek, straps a knife/ to his thigh ... .”

“Another life” is a place Richey knows a parent cannot go. However, she is able to use her literary skill to go where reality will not, a place where she can “see/ the side he hides/ from me, the dark/ beauty” of the aura of warriorhood.

“The Warrior” allows Richey to describe that unknown beauty — and consequently, to offer comfort and empathy for any reader who knows someone in a theater of war.