Philip St Clair

Vicksburg Philip St Clair

Vicksburg, a suite of four long poems, has as its central image the fortress-city during the Civil War. The struggle to take the city impacts the lives of four conflicted people: Abraham Lincoln, a wartime president with an unstable wife and an alienated son; Colonel John Fitzroy De Courcy, a haughty English soldier of fortune at odds with his superiors; Buck, a private in De Courcy's regiment who must deal with an abusive father and an impulsive younger brother; Mary, a strong-willed young woman who marries Buck after the war.