Physical cruelty. This book describes it. Damage. Destruction. Detritus. Willing and unwilling, warriors—all combat bodies, wounded, dying, dead—testify to the cruelty of war. Bomb fragments litter the pages; blood coagulates into words that attest to the carnage. Emotional cruelty. This book displays it. Wreckage. War wrecks lives; war shatters relationships. Trust-removal. Lovers lose loved ones, and lovers, and love. Writes Spiel: “we won’t even trust our brothers / sisters fathers sons mothers / daughters lovers . . .” War betrays, and causes the betrayer to betray. Energy, once used to build lives, gets sucked into war’s destructive whirlpool. Everybody’s energy. Every damned participant in war.

Moral cruelty. Replaces morality. Morality, conspicuously absent. Where has morality gone? Swallowed by war. War swallows morality and coughs up cruelty in abstractions — mind-numbing abstractions, to make war kind, to make those readers reading about war feel comfortable. Which war? “never mind which war,” Spiel responds. Any war will do. What a pity it is that those who most need to read this book for its spirited message are most out of reach. Our-of-reach warmakers. Warmakers in power who have no problem with abstractions. Who have a big problem with reading.

For the most part, Spiel, to his credit, avoids abstractions. A few abstractions, though, can outline Spiel’s expressing a lifetime of war. Abstractions that hide the cruelty and that counterpoint Spiel’s specifics. Abstractions, used comfortingly by historians, and made kind by time. Comfortable, sheltering abstractions: the Lord was praised and the ammunition was passed; only a police action; War on Poverty; the Domino Theory; we wage war to make peace and to keep democracy safe. Never mind which war; another war waits just around the corner.

In this century, war thrives. There’s a hell of a lot of war going around. Make more war; we don’t have enough. America has two wars operating, and America plans others. To justify these wars and to make them legitimate and “safe,” America assigns to them, before their expiration date, and abstraction code name—War on Terror. No, Spiel will have none of that abstraction, either. He strips away the camouflage and lays bare the cruelty. That’s what he achieves in ‘Come Here Cowboy: Poems Of War.’