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Nguyen Duy. Distant Road: Selected Poems of Nguyen Duy. Kevin Bowen, Nguyen Ba Chung, trs. Willimantic, Ct. Curbstone. 1999. xxxi + 257 pages. $15.95. ISBN 1-880684-61-6.
Nguyen Duy (Nhue), who has been considered Vietnam's "favorite poet," is the author of ten collections of verse, a novel, and three volumes of memoirs. The collection Distant Road, named after the poem "Duong Xa," comprises nearly one hundred poems, written between 1975 and 1996. This prolific fifty-one-year-old writer started his career on the battlefields, and the predominant theme in the selected edition at hand is the changing Vietnamese village life, since he was born into a peasant family in Thanh-Hoa province, in northern Annam; but he deals with a variety of topics and also talks with great feeling about love, family, war,...