Here
Bullet
By Brian Turner
Reviewed by
Kenny Brechner
Poetry is rather a difficult subject for review. On the one hand, bad poetry has so much company that one feels somewhat akin to complaining about finding trash at the dump. Good poetry, on the other hand, has succeeded in its purpose, to capture a complex moment of being with language. Using other language to describe that language runs the almost certain hazard of being awkward at best. Still, one wants to let people know that an excellent book of poems is just that.
Brian Turner, a seven year army veteran, who served most recently in Iraq as an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker brigade, has published a collection of poems set in Iraq entitled Here, Bullet, with Alice James Books, the nationally acclaimed poetry cooperative operating as an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington. In one of the poems, Sadiq, Turner reflects that "It should make you shake and sweat,/nightmare you, strand you in a desert/ of irrevocable desolation, the consequences/ seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline/ feeds the muscle its courage, no matter/ what god shines down on you, no matter/ what crackling pain and anger/ you carry in your fists, my friend,/ it should break your heart to kill."
What is true of killing is also true of Turner’s war poems. Readers should be strongly moved by them. Their evocation of loss is achieved with a series of juxtapositions, of artistry and humanity, imagery and effect, perspective and emotion. The poems on the pages of Here, Bullet, with their immediacy of impact, their universality of theme, their blend of cultural and historical insight, and their many tiered reverberations of the aftermath of gut wrenching violence, make for a powerful reading experience. Whoops. (See above)
Turner is a narrative poet, not something in vogue, but indeed, as has often been remarked, success is its own best argument. Turner’s success as a narrator stems from the integrity of his focus on degrees of connection to the death and loss which surround him. Calling for a medivac Turner reports that "I tell him two, two patients urgent surgical though that doesn’t really tell him Sgt. Randolph has four children and can’t die here, his wife wouldn’t allow it if she knew.’ What could be more poignant than Randolph’s wife’s ineffectual decree by proxy inserted here.
Turner is also effective in evoking loss through connections between the observer and the observed. "The skeletons rest in their boxes/ still slack-jawed twenty years later,/ as if amazed by their own deaths./I want to lie down among them,/ to be wrapped in sheets like the flags/ of nations, banded in light and shadow./ I want the Red Cross Worker to lean over ,/ So I can see the tired look in her eyes/ as she writes down my name."
The relationship Turner
establishes with the reader is not dialogue but a tidal insistence on
reflection, that if there is meaning in loss, there must be meaning in what
precedes loss, in what is related to loss. There is no harm in such reflection,
argues Here, Bullet, the rather, harm stems from the lack of it.
