V-Letter and Other Poems

Summary

Composed while Shapiro served with a medical unit in the Pacific, the poems record barracks life, troopships, and the soldier's daily proximity to death without heroic varnish. He writes in tight quatrains and sonnets, applying formal discipline to subjects, latrines, jeeps, fear, that earlier war poetry had often refused. The book helped define a sober, unromantic American voice for the Second World War.