Keith Moul’s The Journal, published by Duck Lake Books, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos
“Like so many other men of his generation, the war was
transformative, making him almost mute on the subject,” writes Keith Moul of
his father, a veteran of World War II, in Moul’s foreword to his poetry
chapbook The Journal. My own father
was of this generation, and, like Moul and many other children of these
soldiers, my brothers and I grew up in an atmosphere largely defined by his
silence. We the nearness of history—the war was less than a decade distant. We
played with our toy guns and plastic soldiers, fought backyard battles, and
vanquished imaginary enemies. But though we were aware that our parent was a
human artifact of that “transformative” time, something about the cocoon of
silence around my father, a silence that seemed nurtured by our mother, kept us
from satisfying our curiosities about the war. Passively, we concluded that
this was what all men—all fathers—were like. We saw so many of them at family
and social gatherings, at church, working on our cars and plumbing, standing
behind the counters of our hardware and shoe stores.
The thing about monuments is that it becomes easy to
believe that they are stone all the way through, and so my brothers remained distant
from my father until his death. As the youngest, maybe because I was furthest
from the defining conflict, maybe because something in my own personality
allowed me to see through the chinks in my father’s rusting armor, I found a
softer parent. Maybe I created him myself. We became friends, my father and I,
but never companions—I learned no more about the war and what it had done to
him than had my siblings.
Keith Moul, a fellow child of a soldier, was gifted late
in life with a chance to peek into the inner life of a man whose life
experiences had made him hard to know. His father, he discovers, had kept a
journal for a short time while serving as a radar man on an aircraft carrier in
the South Pacific at the height of the war. Moul’s mother had held onto that
diary for years after his father’s death, passed the journal on to Moul’s
brother shortly before her own, and his brother gave it to him. As Moul writes
in “Silent Man,” “His silence lasted emptied almost fifty years . . . / I got
the journal on her death. I never knew/ his eloquence, his effort to write to
her his love,/ his sifting of boogies through tedium, the carrier/ tracing
burial sites over the ever-swirling waves.”
And thus, in this chapbook, The Journal, the reader participates in Moul’s creation of links to
a man long dead, to an experience his father kept to himself for “almost fifty
years.” Like an archaeologist, the poet uses the fragments his father leaves to
reconstruct an inner life that, had they not been discovered, would have
remained forever buried: Moul provides, in each of his pieces, first his
father’s journal entry, followed by a poem extrapolated from the detailed
experience. For example, in “The Axis,” we learn from the senior Moul’s entry
of March 26, 1944, this seemingly mundane fact: “Crossed the equator again
yesterday. This makes it about 15 times I have been across it.” From this
information son Keith hypothesizes about the inventorying—of trips, of planes,
of mines and bombs—that fill his father’s journal: “As it happened, even if
asleep at the crossing, he counted it;/ he captured it as an electric surge,
extending life, running life/ as if attached to a long umbilical, as if
overruling death’s generator.”
In “Darling Honey,” Moul quotes an entry from his father’s
journal intended to explain to the poet’s mother why there may have been a
lapse in his letters home: “I was scared a few days, and when you get that way,
you just can’t write, honey.” The son’s poem intuits his father’s feelings:
“Fear in battle . . . the momentary scare of known death/ on the deck, or
unknown death waiting for its moment/ . . . that reaper hanging above every
breath . . ./ This is why, dear, another letter may have failed,/ may have
given you the wrong impression of both me, now, and my universe of war.”
But Keith Moul’s poems in The Journal are more than an explanation or expansion of his
father’s wartime journal entries; they are also more than simple acts of
ventriloquism. Because of the son’s enrichment of the journal through his poetry,
the father is both memorialized and resurrected. The relationship between entry
and poem is both symbiotic and synergistic: the pair becomes a unit that not
only recreates the father’s past war experience, but fills a void in the poet’s
understanding of his father’s silence. The poem “The Fact of Circling Light,”
poses the question, “And what of coming generations amassing questions,/some
risking long stifled memory?” The answers to Moul writes are “too often wide of
the grisly mark, too grisly to confront.” The truth, however, is that by
inhabiting his father’s wartime experience, the son has forged both a truce and
truth from that silence. As Wordsworth states in the opening lines of his “Ode
on the Intimations of Immortality,” “the child is father of the man.” In a very
real sense, Moul himself in his poems has created the father he needed and
missed from his father’s brief journal entries. And through these poems, I find
that I myself gain insight into my own soldier-father’s silences.