The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir

by Bruce Weigl

Overview

With all the breathtaking imagery and lyric fury that characterizes his acclaimed poetry, Bruce Weigl recounts his struggles in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, which tore his life apart and in return gave him his poetic voice. Upon his release from duty he turned to alcohol, drugs, and women, living for years in a confused purgatory until he discovered salvation in poetry and in the love of his wife and their son. Yet it was only through a harrowing journey back to Vietnam, to adopt his eight-year-old daughter, that Weigl was finally able to heal himself. Moving from childhood to the war to a final act of compassion and hope, The Circle of Hanh is a powerful re-creation of a deeply haunted life and, ultimately, a stunning work of redemption.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802138057
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/16/2001
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

	Prologue	1
Part 1	The River Where the Moon Falls	9
Part 2	Stories from the Hidden Book	39
Part 3	Wrestling Sharon	59
Part 4	Spike	77
Part 5	Sharon's October	87
Part 6	The Borderline	105
Part 7	Before and After	123
Part 8	The Circle of Hanh	159

What People are Saying About This

Robert Olen Butler

Bruce Weigl has long shown us how to make beauty out of tragedy by transforming the complex horrors of the Vietnam War into the complex pleasures of poetry. Now in his memoir, The Circle of Hanh , he shows how a life, too, can be transformed. He has turned the tragedies of his life into a way of living.... The Circle of Hanh is a breathtakingly brilliant book. Robert Olen Butler

Tim O'Brien

The Circle of Hanh is a tender and courageous and truly haunting memoir - one of the very best to emerge from the American war in Vietnam. I love this book. It's his lucid prose, his poetic eye and ear, his bluntness, his humanity, his trust in a well-told story. Bruce Weigl made me remember and made me feel again.

Ha Jin

Bruce Wiegl has written an earnestly moving book whose strength, beauty and eloquence reside in the depth of his care and compassion. The Circle of Hanh touches us with the horror and darkness it reveals, but also makes us see the light of hope, joy and magnanimity. It's a book to be relished and cherished.

Editorial Reviews

The Vietnam War remains a haunting subtext for acclaimed poet Weigl (Song of Napalm, etc.), whose 1967 induction into the U.S. Army and year in Vietnam led to his passion for that country's poetry and culture. In this eager but uneven memoir, Weigl recounts his life story--from his hard-bitten childhood in Lorain, Ohio, to a redemptive meeting in 1996 with his adopted daughter-to-be at an orphanage outside Hanoi. Weigl's reverence for storytelling, forged the day a Red Cross worker flung Crime and Punishment at him as he lay sick at a base camp in An Khe, serves as a touchstone throughout this book; he seeks salvation by way of "the great chain of stories." Most memorable are stories from his Zagreb-born grandfather, who oversaw the birth of his first child (at the hands of a drunken doctor hastily pulled away from a late-night card game at the Slovak Club) by holding a gun to the doctor's head to ensure the child's safe delivery. But Weigl's own stories seem to squirm away just as he grasps their elemental truth, leaving raw, underworked passages in their stead. As he tries to mediate the silences and shames that pockmark his life, he seems to find not salvation but deepening realms of pain: "I had done so much traveling in the world of hurt that had been my life," he writes, "that the boundaries we need in order to be human had vanished." (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Adult/High School-Weigl tells his story within the framework of his 1996 trip to Vietnam to bring back his newly adopted daughter, Hanh. As he waits in Hanoi for the bureaucracy to approve his visit, he flashes back to other equally poignant moments in his life. In breathtakingly lyrical prose, he re-creates his past. He shows the small boy growing up as the son of a tough steelworker in Lorrain, OH; the older boy taken advantage of by his cheerleader baby-sitter; the innocent 19-year-old soldier in the rice paddies of Vietnam; and, finally, the award-winning poet, friend of Vietnam, and honored translator of Vietnamese poetry. The childhood vignettes capture not only the description and color of the `50s, but also its moods and temper. The flashbacks to the Vietnam War are more subtle than graphic, and more powerful because of that subtlety. Despite all that has been written about that war, Weigl finds new words that bring its experience straight to readers' hearts. For him, the return to Vietnam to adopt a child of that land as his own completes this circle of his life. For readers, that trip is poignant and unforgettable.- Becky Ferrall, Stonewall Jackson High School, Manassas, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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