"To be a writer," Bruce Weigl told Contemporary Authors (1984), "is to accept who you are, your background, the ruckus of your family life, the whole landscape of your past. For me it was steel mills and industrial waste. That's who I was and what I have to go on. If I'm lucky and work hard enough, I can turn the gritty language of an industrial city into poetry." While the urban landscape and family life certainly figure in Weigl's work, he is better known as one of the most eloquent poets to emerge from America's involvement in the Vietnam War. These subjects--Vietnam and family life in the industrial part of the United States--mirror and complement each other, giving Weigl's poetry its particular distinction and power.

Bruce Weigl was born on 27 January 1949 in Lorain, Ohio, to Albert Louis Weigl and Zora Grasa Weigl. He received his B.A. in...