BOOK REVIEW: The Warrior: A Mother's Story of a Son at War

Before he was a warrior; he was a boy; / Before he drank blood, he drank milk. . . . writes poet Frances Richey of her son. In 2004 when she visited an exhibition of Aztec sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum, she found herself face-to-face with the “destroyer,” the dark body / of the snake that was her son, Ben’s, mysterious ambition. Graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1998, then going on to become a captain in the Special Forces, Ben spent two tours of duty in Iraq and often was out of touch for months. Richey asks how this could happen: Where had it come from, / his certainty of purpose?
Richey’s first book, The Burning Point, was published in 2004, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof selected one of her poems as a winner in a 2007 Iraq War poetry contest. Richey is opposed to the war, which makes her reflections more moving: The day he graduated from West Point, / the sun was so bright I couldn’t see / the secretary of defense, a dark speck / under the white awning. Later, she finds herself searching for her son’s face in the perfectly aligned rows of warriors.
Richey is a yoga teacher, and she wonders if she has the will to make a spear of her arms and expose her heart.
In 28 intense and personal poems, she explores the universal paths of regret, tenderness, loss, and alienation that connect and distance mothers and sons.