Six Vietnamese Poets

""How crowded the city a war has just passed through. Streets with ruined houses, whole blocks devastated, ...now roads widened, trees planted, new train station, new flower basin in the garden, ...multicolored shirts and dresses, the carefree, the loudspeakers blaring out new songs."" So poet Y Nhi describes a postwar cityscape in Vietnam. She's one of the writers anthologized in Six Vietnamese Poets., edited by poet Nguyen Ba Chung and Kevin Bowen, director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The volume also showcases the work of Nguyen Khoa Diem, Lam Thi My Da, Nguyen Duc Mau, Xuan Quynh and Pham Tien Duat, all of whom came of age during the American war and offer scenes of Vietnamese life in the last 40 years. (Apr.)