In her latest collection, Civilians (LSU Press), military spouse Jehanne Dubrow seeks to remind everyone, herself most of all, that “Peacetime is an unforgiving / goddess. She tears anyone,” and to not allow such tearing to let witness slip from the private attention that is so easily swamped by calls for public outrage.

To care for one soldier — even if that soldier is a spouse — and the soldiering that all civilian spouses do to endure the penumbras of war is a monumental feat, but there will be no monuments built to such work. Hence, Dubrow’s Civilians serves in the role of public memorial, even as it engages the private life of the author.

“I am saying my husband // dodges the names I aim at him. / He becomes a stream, / slipping through my hands.”

The passage above, from the fifth section of the poem “Metamorphoses,” is indicative of such engagement even as the poem nods toward Ovid. The author avoids even the small hints of lionizing, instead rendering each person in the marriage as complicated, inconsistent (which is to say, deeply human), and willing to become something new. This poem anchors the book to the dual Western traditions of literature and war but also demonstrates how we give way to an uncertain future and what it will make of us and how, simultaneously, we give grace to others to change at variable rates of progress.

I was particular moved by two excellent poems early in the collection, “Hyacinthus” and “Brothers,” both for their lyrical beauty and their wisdom of attention. I suspect Dubrow may share my assertion that while I don’t believe poets to be sages, they do have a way of seeing the world and embodying language that is at times preternatural. This is true even when the subject material revolves around the particular distant domesticities of midlife, military retirement, and the aforementioned (inevitable) metamorphosis everyone must endure as their relationships age.

To be said to evoke wisdom is high praise, but the work of these poems, their tender surprises, their unflinching vision, earns it with every line. Having been unfamiliar with Dubrow’s other two volumes — Civilians concludes a trilogy — I wish I’d found her work sooner. I hold that wish not because I am a veteran, although there are certainly a few in my family, and not because I am the spouse of a service member, but because I am an American, and like many other Americans, my memory, my empathy, and my capacity to love are all too often in short supply.

Civilians is a collection that stands in opposition to self-righteousness; it sings “Some Final Notes on Odysseus,” about how easily we discard people. “No one wants the old soldier / slicing a plum, just as he used to take / his dagger to the belly of a rival,” the poem announces before reminding us that war dehumanizes soldier and civilian alike.

The collection is, of course, timely, given the undemocratic bent of our current government, but it is also timeless, a quality evoked in its allusion to ancient myth. There is a demystifying — or a demythologizing — of how culture makes little room for military spouses to speak, truly, about their experiences. They are often positioned as part of someone else’s story. So, when there are admissions and admonitions, such as in “Domestic Policy,” where the poet writes, “Marriage is not / two ideologies fighting at a table, / while the soup goes cold / on the spoon. // Marriage is two people / shouting about spices,” any reader can feel the plain, hard-won, almost resigned wisdom of that observation.

That wisdom holds as the poem turns to ask forgiveness of the reader, stating, “Perhaps, I said divorce / for all the wrong reasons.” But perhaps it is us who should be asking forgiveness of Dubrow for the silences we allow, the pressures we produce as a culture. Then, we could accept, unequivocally, the way she and Civilians lead us toward a specific, resilient gratitude.

[Editor’s note: Steven Leyva will speak at this year’s Gaithersburg Book Festival on Sat., May 17th.]

Steven Leyva’s new collection is The Opposite of Cruelty.