The Battlefield Guide
HARPERS FERRY / ANTIETAM / GETTYSBURG
Poems by Rodger Martin
The Battlefield Guide is a time-traveler's guide to the battlefields that shaped the American conscience. It explores obscure but fascinating links to the world of today and tests the assumptions of that American conscience.
Included with the book is a CD of a musical performance of both “Gettysburg” and “Antietam.”"The Battlefield Guide follows in the footsteps of Herman Melville’s Battle Pieces and Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body, but rather than use the poems as a viewmaster from which to imagine the Civil War, this volume strives to use those landscapes as a prism from which to view ourselves, Americans, in all the contemporary shades and colors that have evolved since the Civil War."
-From the Introduction
About the Author
RODGER MARTIN is a touring artist for the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA). He has received an Appalachia Award for poetry and a New Hampshire State Council on the Arts award for fiction. He has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Humanities to study T. S. Eliot and Thomas Hardy at Oxford University and John Milton at Duquesne University. His work has been published in literary journals throughout the United States and China where he also wrote a series of essays on American poetry for The Yangtze River Journal.
He and six colleagues are the focus of the book On the Monadnock: New Pastoral Poetry (Chinese Drama Press: 2006, Bejing). Martin often collaborates with other artists. His Portsmouth Voice and Vision project, Anthem Concatenus, with painter Vicki Arico now hangs in the Portsmouth Court House. He is the managing editor of The Worcester Review and teaches journalism at Keene State College. As a journalist, he regularly covered Democratic National Conventions between 1976 and 2004. Additionally, Martin directs The Milton Ensemble, dedicated to the dramatic presentation of Paradise Lost by John Milton. This is his second collection from Hobblebush Books. The Blue Moon Series was released in 2007 and chosen by Small Press Review as one of its summer picks.
About the Illustrator
CHAD GOWEY was born in 1987 and was raised in Princeton, Massachusetts. He is currently attending the Rhode Island School of Design, specializing in Illustration. Working in paint, ink, digital media and beyond, Chad is fascinated by everything from the masters to the fantastic. He is the winner of several Scholastic Art awards, and has earned recognition at the local and national level for his achievement in the arts.
56 pp, Paperback / Illustrated
ISBN 978-0-9801672-4-5
Price $16.95 (includes CD)
Publication Date: February 15, 2010
Gettysburg, Blue-Eyed Boy and Antietam read by the author with musical accompaniment, recorded live.
CD included with book.
