At the End of the War

DeWitt Clinton’s poems in At the End of the War layer ancient, sacred ritual and texts with contemporary life and language. Clinton’s chiseled poems bespeak a consciousness trying to come to terms with history, specifically the horrific atrocities of WWII and the Holocaust. There’s a communal “we” in many of the poems of a people searching for an identity, a marginalized culture trying to define and reinvent itself on the historical stage. At the End of the War offers a poetic coming to terms with history, a Taoist way to emerge on the other side of atrocities—and speaks poetically for the self and contemporary society.
Krysia Jopek, author of Maps and Shadows, Aquila Polonica
In DeWitt Clinton’s newest volume of poetry, he writes elegies to the past and present, poems that are lovely and compelling, but “always humble, always/ written in memory.” In sometimes long lyric-narratives, he interprets Biblical stories and honors the Holocaust, artists, and other poets, often in poems written in another’s voice, which allows readers another perspective. These are poems of searching and discovery, of consequences and coming-to-terms, of family, friendship, connections—some strong, some tentative. He writes, “Perhaps that’s all we can do—wonder and wonder some more.”
Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017-2018 and author of A Theory of Lipstick, Main Street Rag
I wonder how DeWitt Clinton’s new book of poems, At the End of the War, happened to find me just as I needed it. I was weeping when I put it down, and then realized I had been weeping for quite some time. He writes in his poem “Here,” about the slaughter of Jews in the pogrom in the village of Busk in the Ukraine: I am very sorry to have put this in front of you. These are poems about having seen the world, having lived, and having observed what people can do to one another: both the good and evil.
Alan Walowitz, author of Exactly Like Love, Osedax Press, and contributing editor, Verse-Virtual