Doug Anderson' s There Was Always Smoke: New & Selected Poems brings together poems selected from Anderson' s four critically acclaimed collections of poetry along with a substantial number of new poems, along with an introduction by Paul Alexander. Doug Anderson is best known for his poems on the Vietnam War where he served as a medic and an eyewitness to the distinct horrors of that conflict. But Anderson' s oeuvre is more than that of a war poet. Andersen continues to write poetry more than fifty years after the war, and his work captures the lingering trauma of those days in poems whose topics range from alcoholism to love. To read There Was Always Smoke is to experience a life fully lived and in turn to understand an America whose innocence was lost long ago.
