Sixty-six-eight verses – Heartfelt poems

“Sixty” means 60 – sixty years old to publish one’s first collection of poems. Sixty years old to “get married”… These are all rare stories. But if poetry is considered as expression, the aesthetics of poetry is harmony, the philosophy of poetry is the experiences of “heartache”, then the “point of view” at the age of 60 is a “profound life” choice:

Youth is full of storms
Brothers at war, parents in poverty
Half a life to talk about love
How many unfortunate coincidences
End of life fate is unfinished
At the age of sixty, he became a ferryman.

(Self-proclaimed)

Ba Thanh’s poetry, therefore, is the flesh and blood of 60 years of his life: from happy to sad stories, from the past to the present, from the general to the particular, from the time when his hair was still green to when it turned gray… There are too many things to explain the name “Luc Thap” of the collection of poems, and here, all the search for “lyrical technique” is only secondary. He cares most about the sincerity of emotions, about honestly expressing the thoughts, feelings and the image and appearance of the lyrical subject.

As a student, full of faith, Nguyen Ba Thanh put down his books and followed his friends to follow the call of ideals, for the independence and freedom of the Fatherland:

Not yet on the front line
Suddenly heard the sound of battlefield guns calling my name
…
Folded leather bound book
Open the first page of the textbook of life
Heavy backpack long distance
Students sing the marching song in class.

(Song of the Army)

Although his military service was not long, it was enough to preserve in him beautiful memories of a hot-tempered leader, of his beloved comrades, which left a mark in his poems on distant overseas lands and left many emotions in his heart: Is that river the Volga Dong? / The calm water lulls the banks to sleep / Unlike the Red River, the Lo River with red rolling silt / The vast water waves beat strongly on both banks (Training in the desert); Foreign homeland has much wine and flowers / Our homeland has red blood soaking the brown shirt (Afternoons of Ba - Cu). And right from those hot, seething days, in the battle cry, Nguyen Ba Thanh's sensitive soul had many thoughts and torments:

I hold the AK in my hand
With the price of ten tons of rice
…
I dream of visiting again next time.
Will sell AK to buy rice milling machine
Selling radar to build schools
Selling Sam-3 fruit to build a thousand-bed hospital
(Bamboo mill and airplane, rocket)

Nguyen Ba Thanh’s poetry is a sentimental one. Whether writing about the times or family circumstances, he always looks at life with a measure of humanity. That is why, besides the verses of “worrying about the times”, Nguyen Ba Thanh’s Luc Thap contains love and private feelings. His poetry is a small “family museum”, a world of thoughts and emotions connecting him with his blood relatives: paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, maternal grandmother, father, mother, siblings – some still alive and some dead, wife and children – ex-wife, new wife, son, daughter-in-law, daughter, grandchildren and even in-laws…

To have the warm and happy family reunion today, Ba Thanh's small family once wavered and fell apart. Those who were close to him and his close friends all remembered the stormy time of his life through the heavy and bitter experiences:

No money but have to break up
Just plain, just bland, just spicy, just strong
A life of hard work
When old, he becomes empty-handed from the beginning.
No mandarin, no lord
No house, no wife, no buffalo, no plow
(Break up without money)

However, when the hurt, loss and pain of separation passed, the sky became brighter each day, he remembered and wrote about his former life partner with deep sympathy and love:

Remember when you lived with me
Love and respect as husband
Small room in Thanh Xuan
Raising chickens, raising pigs, sewing clothes
Watering vegetables and sweeping leaves all the time
Spinning wool, spinning thread, all day, all night
(To my ex-wife)

It can be said that Ba Thanh's poetry has touched readers through the details and everyday events "dusty with life" that are haunting and unforgettable.

As one of the “leading experts” on Che Lan Vien and the theory of poetic thinking, he often discusses sharply on the types of thinking: introverted and extroverted, similar and contrasting. Accordingly, if possible, I would temporarily call Ba Thanh’s poetry introverted poetry, the strong point of his poetry is the exploitation of oppositions and contrasts. Along with it is the sensitivity to humor. One must be very brave to dare to bring out one’s ego and individuality to laugh and joke… And especially to dare to use one’s oldness and antiquity, as well as that of one’s generation to “compete” with, and respond to the youthfulness and modernity of the 8x poetry generation of the 20th century:

His poems talk about the mountains and rivers
My poems talk about men and women
His poems are inspired by our enemies.
My poems are inspired by marital discord.
My poems have promises and vows
Poetry is free to come and go like butterflies and bees
(Your poetry and my poetry)

Sixty is 10 years older than the age of “Fifty knows the destiny”. The poetry of a person who has passed that important threshold of life cannot be “play” although nowadays there are many people who “play with poetry”. Reading Sixty, I tried to “use my soul to understand other people’s souls”, but there are certainly many confidences and messages that I have not been able to fully feel. So, I would like to ask those who are close friends and soul mates to open their hearts to receive a poetic voice that was raised in the afternoon of life like a kind of ginger that is both spicy and pungent, but very heartfelt, one could say it is the heartfelt verses of the poet himself:

Sixty years old to bring out
Please let me confide with my friends.