On the Shores of Welcome Home

Winner of the Isabella Gardner Award In this Isabella Gardner Award-winning collection of poems, Bruce Weigl meditates on the ghosts and the grace one encounters in life’s second act. A celebrated poet and veteran of the Vietnam War, Weigl offers a nuanced sense of aging as a departure and death as a returning home. With a sage’s eye for mindfulness and a soldier’s longing for the country where he served, Weigl’s poems reveal the long scars left by Vietnam and the new possibilities one encounters in the wake of life-altering experiences.    From "The Hà Nội Winds Bringing Winter to the Old-World Elegy" The soon to be bare winter branchesdon’t exactly tremble—that’s a human thing—but they move in the wind of my waitingin what looks like the shiver that love bringsto your neurons, right down to the cellswho are happy for some company, after all.I could sit out here all day and watch the worldleave us behind, and not have a single regretexcept for not living even harder and fasterthan I d