The Irish and Americans have both endured the warping of words to service military ends, the US poet Kevin Bowen tells Ian Kilroy in Boston.

From Homer's Iliad to Wilfred Owen and Francis Ledwidge, war has always inspired a poetic response. Yet looking at the calm, grey-haired American poet Kevin Bowen, it is difficult to imagine him crouching near the Cambodian border in 1969, under a hail of mortar fire.

Poet? Yes. But was this gentle, softly spoken man once a soldier? "I was a kid, self-centred, I had no idea what I was getting into," says Bowen, now 35 years wiser than he was when he was drafted into the US army in 1968 and sent to Vietnam.

"I dropped out of school, and they turned my name over to the draft board - it was gobbled up pretty quickly . . . . I wasn't convinced about the war, but a lot of my friends were going. I wasn't informed enough to really know what was going on."

Bowen spent a single year in Vietnam, but it was a year that influenced the rest of his life. It led him to poetry, to write of his wartime experiences. But it also led him to an academic career as director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

And, as Bowen points out, his time in Vietnam also led him indirectly back to Ireland, to the country his grandmother had left many years before.

"After Vietnam I went back to school and ended up studying in Dublin, where I rediscovered the link with Carraroe [in Co Galway\], where my grandmother was from. I went on as a Fulbright scholar to Oxford and kept making trips back west."

That concern with retracing steps, of patching together the past and trying to come to an understanding of it, is evident throughout Bowen's poetry, whether he is writing about Ireland or Vietnam. Indeed, in his latest book, Eight True Maps Of The West, published by Dedalus, both countries figure centrally.

It draws on his first two collections, Playing Basketball With The Viet Cong, from 1994, and Forms Of Prayer At The Hotel Edison, from 1998. But the volume is completed with new poems, where the interest is more in Ireland than in Vietnam, where the personal past of his family history rather than the tragic public history of Vietnam's recent past tends to dominate his imagination. With each book, Bowen's poetic concerns seem to have moved on.

"The first book was definitely dealing with my own experience," says Bowen, "particularly with my experience in Vietnam and going back there after the war. I didn't know how to write about Vietnam for a long time. I learned the language and kept going back, trying to see the place in a historical and cultural context. What's clear is that the early poems are about the immediacy of the experience - the later poems are mediated by some sort of moral distance and understanding."

What Bowen sees as common to his interest in Vietnam and Ireland is "the experience of colonisation, the experience of displacement". Bowen, in his learning of the Vietnamese language, is eager to understand things on their own terms, in their own contexts, to give to things their true names and "make true maps", as he puts it.

This desire is evident in the sequence Eight True Maps Of The West, where he gives place names in their original Irish before offering their English rendering. Cloch na Toirní is always Cloch na Toirní before it is the Rock of the Thunder, An Garraí Bán is only secondly the White Field it later became. It is a true and original map that Bowen wishes to offer. Indeed, he sees it as the poet's function to offer truth, to counter lies, to defend language when it comes under stress.

"To see words being twisted into lies is distressing for a writer," says Bowen. "Poets have to speak out, even as a gesture that what is happening is a detouring of democracy. Poetry comes into its own at these times" of war and conflict.

Unsurprisingly, Bowen was active in the anti-war movement in the lead-up to the recent US invasion of Iraq. He organised poetry readings against the war and is evidently appalled that the kind of lies Americans were told during the Vietnam conflict are being retold today.

"It's more frightening now, I think. During the war in Iraq the media were very much cheerleading, drooling over the technology. It was much more jingoistic; the reportage was almost gloating over the power of the US military and the 'mother of all bombs'. People who talk against the war are stereotyped, labelled, discredited.

"But eventually there'll be the Pentagon papers, and we'll see the lies they've been telling us. Indeed they're already coming out."

The old role of poet as dissident - as was manifest, for example, in the Soviet Union - is clearly one Bowen feels the US poet must take up. In his new poems, Bowen notes that "what can or cannot be said any more is not easy to decipher", that "good men and women try to speak up / and are silenced". There is clearly an element of the poet as witness in Bowen's work, of the poet as animator of lost worlds, whether Irish or Vietnamese, that others would rather leave inanimate and forgotten.

What informs his poetic sensibility is a sense of loss, whether for Boston's West End, where Bowen grew up in a tenement that was torn down to make the new Charles River Park, for what was destroyed by the Americans in Vietnam or for his Irish heritage, which was lost as his grandmother became American.

"I began to reconnect with Ireland as part of a process of maturation, as a person and as a writer," says Bowen. "In my work I'm trying to reconnect some of those links that are lost, for myself and for other people too - especially for my kids. Being a parent connects you to other generations somehow, and that's important to me."

Bowen's concern with family, past and present, living and dead, ultimately appears to be a greater preoccupation than his preoccupation with war and the experiences of his youth. Some of the best poems in Eight True Maps Of The West are the ones that figure his father, his deceased brother or blood relations who have passed on. Here the extended family and the poet's personal biography form a complex web of identity that Bowen weaves into some fine verses. It is, as he says, a layered identity.

"I feel very pulled between three landscapes: the West End of Boston, when I was a child; Vietnam, where some of the most crucial experiences of my life occurred; and the landscape of Ireland, which was imprinted on me as I grew up."

That multiple identity, coupled with Bowen's life as both a man of action and a man of words, gives him a unique authority to speak to us in these troubled, complex times.

Eight True Maps Of The West is published by Dedalus, €10

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Shipwrights

for Sean the Shore

By the edge of the shore two brothers at work

shaving fresh cut boards to repair the broken hull

of a red Achill yawl. My son and I moved past

two small dogs barking as we skirted the fence.

All morning I had sensed a fierce questioning

burning in my son's chest. When we'd passed

he looked up and told me his quandary: "If a kind

man raised a vicious dog would it still be mean?"

he asked. I looked away to the fields, wondering

was it the dogs, or something I had done or said,

that had brought on this questioning. I told him

"No. It is not necessarily true. A dog might still

grow up kind." I think he sensed a hesitation in

my voice, and so persisted, asking after a pause:

"If a mean man raised a kind dog would it in turn

become mean?" I confessed I did not have an answer,

but that good dogs could survive such things

and turn out true and kind. He looked at me as if

satisfied for the time being with my makeshift answering.

Off the bog we turned to watch a flock of linnets taking off,

followed them, our eyes pulled by their motion back

down to the shore. We could see them there still,

the two men off in the distance, like figures in

an ancient painting, hard at work, despite the coming storm.

-Kevin Bowen, from Eight True Maps Of The West