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Am I clean enough to kill for them,
do they wish me to kill
For them or is my place while death licks his lips
and strides to them
In the galley still?

And Goldensohn made the brilliant decision to broaden—or maybe "lengthen" is the appropriate image—the notion of "war poetry" even further by including subsequent poetic reflections on a particular war. So, for instance, the section on the Alamo includes the refreshing perspective of contemporary Hispanic American poet Martín Espada's "The Other Alamo"; the Civil War section extends to an excerpt from contemporary ex-Marine Andrew Hudgins' After the Lost War, his powerful re-imagining of Confederate soldier-poet Sidney Lanier's life; and the section on the Indian Wars stretches to include work by contemporary Native American poets like Joy Harjo and Louise Erdrich.

The introductions to each section of the anthology are a model of concise, accessible contextualizing. For each war's poetry, Goldensohn offers historical and literary context. She is also interested in following certain threads through the centuries of our war poetry: how flag and country strive to be reaffirmed with each successive war; how poetry honoring war's leaders seems to cease after the Civil War; how the poetry seesaws between the conventionally formal and the experimentally vernacular until the Vietnam War, when a stylistic explosion breaks open forms and welcomes a wild array of ultra-vernacular first-person self-examining verse.

War itself, as a mode of national behavior, has become increasingly controversial in the past nearly hundred years. Goldensohn makes clear, especially in Dismantling Glory, that her own stance is firmly against militarism and war's brutally destructive waste. But to her credit she doesn't let her personal abhorrence of war slant her selection of poems. So we get the rousing cheer for "heroes' blood" in Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Old Ironsides" along with E.E. Cummings' "i sing of Olaf"—"whose warmest heart recoiled at war: / a conscientious object-or." And in Dismantling Glory, one of her main themes is a persistent contradiction in soldier poems that fascinates her: how these poems tend simultaneously toward revulsion against war yet also celebration of it as a testing ground for masculinity.

Dismantling Glory has other running motifs as well, tracked through soldier poets from World War I through World War II and the Vietnam War: adaptation of the lyric as war poetry's genre; the complex gendering of male soldier poetry; changing perceptions of the soldier as victim (World War I) to the soldier as killer (World War II) to soldier as both perpetrator of atrocities and victim of industrial war's technology (Vietnam); increasing sensitivity to the civilians whose homeland is the battleground. Except for the opening overview chapter and the final chapter treating a range of American poets of the Vietnam War, Goldensohn's method is to construct her book around representative poets for each period. The method works best for the chapter on Wilfred Owen, who really was transformative in crafting a new war lyric of witness to soldiers' suffering. Goldensohn helpfully contextualizes Owen's achievement with poetry from his colleague Siegfried Sassoon as well as prose about the Great War from contemporaries and subsequent historians. The next chapter focuses on Auden because, Goldensohn argues persuasively, though not a soldier himself he produced a poetry of ironic distance which definitively influenced the soldier poets of World War II. The chapter's purpose is to explore the intriguing question of why no major poet of World War II emerged. Goldensohn deftly fields the various possible reasons: a feeling of belatedness, as if Owen and his contemporaries had already "done" the battlefield experience; Auden's astringencies about avoiding pathos; a numbness at having to follow not only Auden but the giants Yeats and Eliot and Pound.

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