The Invasion Handbook

The first installment of Paulin's ambitious new epic poem about World War II

No matter the Führer is uncultured
he has Heidegger says
such beautiful such sculptured
hands--but these are dangerous days
and Röhm is cultic now is Hitler's
righthand man
so might not the philosopher
be talking in riddles
like one of our ancient warriors?

--from "The Night of the Long Knives"

The Invasion Handbook opens with the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, which excluded Germany from the community of nations, and with the answering but ill-fated attempt of the Locarno Treaties of 1925 to restore the torn fabric of Europe. It evokes Weimar culture, Hitler's rise to power, and the beginnings of the persecution of the Jews. The poem is a triumph of technique, a simultaneous vision that proceeds by quotation and collage, catalogue and caption, prose as well as verse--a myriad staging of historical realities through the poet's intense and bitter scrutiny of the particulars of time and place. It affirms the struggle and the memory of a generation upon whom the doors of living memory are now closing and it extends concerns which have long haunted Tom Paulin's poetry: the relation of art to war and to questions of national identity, the search for peace and for a shared civic culture.