"I have never recovered from that night, or the weight
of his hand on my shoulder."
The Poetry of
H. C.
PALMER
Battalion Surgeon· Veteran · Poet
THE BOOK
Feet of the Messenger
BkMk Press — New Letters
Between the horrors of the Vietnam War and the pacific silences of the Kansas prairie, Palmer honors both the beauty of the English language and the ancient powers of poetry to speak experience without diminishing it. These are poems of war remembered, landscapes held close, and the long work of healing.
2018
Kansas Notable Book
PRAISE
Seldom has the poetry of war achieved such aesthetic intensity and moral clarity, or so powerfully raised us from the illusion that the wounds of Achilles will ever mend.
B. H. Fairchild
The Art of the Lathe & Usher
An extraordinary testament to that moment in history and to its afterlife — luminous portraits of compassion and reprieve, a vision of the better world we still might have a chance to make.
Linda Gregerson
Magnetic North & Waterborne
Invocations to the spirits of memory and healing. They are witnesses that must be heard.
Karl Marlantes
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War
Palmer writes with the visceral authority of combat seen and visions earned. Vital, necessary reading.
Donald Anderson
Fire Road & Gathering Noise from My Life
About the Poet
H. C. Palmer was a young medical resident when he was drafted by President Lyndon B. Johnson to serve in Vietnam. As a battalion surgeon, he treated comrades and wounded civilians alike, bearing witness to suffering on an intimate scale. He saw many die.
Returning home to Kansas, he continued to practice medicine while carrying the war with him through the landscapes of the plains — the tall-grass prairies, the trout streams of Wyoming, the rhythms of a family farm. In Feet of the Messenger, his debut collection, Palmer transforms that weight into poetry of uncommon precision and grace.
His work ranges across rural Kansas and war-torn Vietnam, linking place to memory, dream to reality, the past's violence to the present's fragile beauty. An epigraph offers the collection's guiding principle: to see and know a place is a contemplative act.
