Homecoming by Bruce Dawe

An appreciation of "Homecoming" by Bruce Dawe

Dawe here dramatises the homecoming of Australian veterans' bodies from Vietnam. This is clearly an anti-war poem, reproducing in the seventies the sentiments of the First World War poets.

In 25 lines of broken verse presented in one demanding stanza, Dawe recounts how "they are bringing" home the bodies "in deep freeze lockers"... zipped up "in green plastic bags" "bringing them home, now, too late." He picks out the rituals and consequences of this event on a relatively stable and uncaring society back home (in Australia). Ironically, he celebrates their coming home across the curvatures of the globe and across the international borders as they fly homeward bound. Homecomings are usually consoling and familiar particularly in the American culture where "home' acquires very many strong associations of rest, trust and identity. But here the term is deliberately turned upside down as the dead return home - a telling commentary on the VN war and what it destroyed.

The diction is plain like prose, the pace is relentless and the tone is ironic. The drama of the historic present moment is expressed in many present participles: "picking... bringing....rolling ... whining..." In 25 lines, the poet drives us across many details, many particulars in the fixed drama of death. Dawe's point of view is not uncritical. We are enjoined not to be passionless spectators but to feel this great injustice to our young men. The irony is that the young are brought back to the old ridiculous curvatures of our old continent's coasts and into the cities and small towns where they were raised. Thus a spider web of grief "in his bitter geometry" spreads