U.S. Army Sergeant Paul David Adkins packed poetry books for his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. While nighttime artillery shook his container housing unit, he read by flashlight The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath and other poets "who pulled me from the fire, fed me bread and wine in the dark, warm corners of their books." Adkins responded to each poet with a poem of his own, collected and published by LitRiot Press as Flying Over Baghdad with Sylvia Plath.
I could not resist that title!
Adkins (B.A. history, M.F.A. poetry; jobless, he joined the army; today, he teaches) was my grad-school classmate, now the author of six poetry books and chapbooks, the latest, Sound and Fury, giving voice to the victims of Attica's prison rebellion. Like Plath's his poems irradiate their subjects down to their subatomic particles, and readers feel it. Paul and I recently met again after 30 years. In this video (6:33) he reads from Flying Over Baghdad a poem inspired by Adrienne Rich's poem about Ethel Rosenberg and the deadly nature of the powers that be.
Paul says: "You are who you read."