History, Vietnam, the immigrant dream, landscapes of failure and fulfillment lattice the themes and motifs of this visionary work. In progress since 1972, haild by poet Barbara H. Holland as the organ voice of the United States, this American epic carries forward the probling lines of Leaves of Grass and The Maximus Poems. Not since the long-narrative American journeys of Longfellow and Walt Whitman to the syncopated sequences of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Allen ginsberg has such a poem explored the surface and substance of the American soil and soul.