The Plot: Chris Crowe's 2014 verse novel Death Coming Up the Hill is set in 1968 and tells the story of seventeen-year-old Ashe. Ashe has a troubled home life: his father is conservative, dogmatic, and racist and his mother is a passionate anti-war and civil rights activist. Although his parents do not like, let along love, each other, they make it clear to Ashe that he is the only reason they got married and have stayed together. Adding another complexity to Ashe's experience, he is getting ready to graduate and is seriously concerned about the draft and the Vietnam war. Ashe plans to go to college, with the help of his father's tuition money, in order to avoid being drafted. But when his mother becomes pregnant after forming a relationship with a man at an anti-war meeting and gives birth to a biracial child, Ashe's father leaves and threatens to withdraw Ashe's tuition money if he doesn't come to live with him. Ashe does experience some respite at school where he enjoys his US history class and spending time with his girlfriend, Angela, whose brother is serving in Vietnam.The Poetry: One of the most unique aspects of Crowe's verse novel is its form. It consists of poems made up of a series of 976 haiku, one syllable for each of the 16,592 American soldiers who died in Vietnam in 1968. Crowe's verse novel is a meditation on the number 17: a prime number, the number of syllables in a haiku, the age of his protagonist, the birthday of his protagonist (May 17), and a number when multiplied by 976 equals the 1968 death toll. Crowe use of the haiku throughout his collection is effective in focusing the reader on breath and pause. According to Crowe, the final two stanzas of the last poem in the collection are inspired by "an American soldier's letter written shortly before he died in the assault on Hamburger Hill in May 1969" (199) and the verse novel takes its title from these final lines: "I see Death coming / up the hill, and I am not / ready to meet him" (197). This final haiku embodies the spirit of the narrative as a whole and of the haiku as a formal approach in general, with its focus on the natural landscape, the speaker's individual experience of his/her surroundings, and the meditation upon the quotidian.
The Page: Each poem in Death Coming Up the Hill begins with the date and the number of lives lost in the war during the preceding week. Ashe explains that this number is a figure that his US history teaching puts up on the board every day; Crowe explains in his historical and author's notes in the back of the book that the Thursday edition of daily newspapers during this time period published the death count, which ultimately "so commonplace that many Americans barely noticed them" (201). Crowe notes in his author's note that he "wanted his main character to notice and become fascinated by the death counts as he gained an awareness of the troubled world around him" (201).I found Crowe's verse novel to be an interesting exercise in the use of form throughout a collection, but at times the didacticism of the narrative was a bit over the top. I give it three stars.
