Jan Barry

Montclair, NJ— Journalist and author Jan Barry has written a poet’s view of his life and times. Spanning his experiences as a young soldier in Vietnam to coping with his wife’s death of cancer, Earth Songs is a storyteller’s own tale of discovery.

“I think it is not an exaggeration to say that poetry is to language what gemstones are to geology. Jan shows us that the enormous emotional pressure war brings to bear can work on the soul to produce both a living hell and, out of it, true gems of artful illumination,” John Greeley wrote in an early review of Earth Songs in Intervention Magazine (www.interventionmag.com).

“In all the years since I was there I never looked back,” wrote Greeley, a Marine veteran of Vietnam. “’Let sleeping demons lie’ was my motto and I was not sure at all that I wanted to go there now. But reading this slender book of poetry took me on a surprisingly familiar and healing journey.”

Jan Barry is a poet, author of A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Campaigns, and staff writer for The Record of Bergen County, NJ. He is a recipient of the 2003 Community Service Award from the Society of the Silurians, the oldest press club in the United States. Born in 1943 in Ithaca, NY, he lives in Montclair, NJ, where he and his late wife, Paula, raised two sons.

Appointed to the U.S. Military Academy after a stint in an Army aviation unit in Vietnam, he resigned from West Point to become a writer and peace activist. A founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, his poems on the war appeared in diverse publications from the Chicago Tribune and New York Times to A People and A Nation: A History of the United States.

His antiwar verses first appeared in Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, published by 1st Casualty Press, founded by Jan Barry and fellow veterans Larry Rottmann and Basil T. Paquet. With W.D. Ehrhart, he compiled a sequel, Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam. Marshaling writers and artists confronting the threat of nuclear war, he also edited Peace Is Our Profession: Poems and Passages of War Protest.

His poetry has also appeared in numerous other anthologies including From Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and its Aftermath, The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs and Poems, and most recently, Emerson of Harvard: A Celebrative Bicentennial Anthology to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Additional biographical information is available at www.janbarry.net.

Earth Songs: New & Selected Poems (144 pp, paperback, $15.95) is published by iUniverse, Inc., a computer-age publisher of books and e-books. It is available at www.iuniverse.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and special order from bookstores.

About iUniverse

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