Back to index of Nerve 12 - Summer 2008

Here, Bullet

Brian Turner
Bloodaxe Books, 2007
ISBN: 978 1 85224 799 7

By Val Walsh

This is a collection of poems written by an American soldier while on a year's duty in Iraq as an infantry team leader, from November 2003. Some poems have sub-titles in Arabic and there are explanatory notes and original sources provided at the end of the book, mainly for the Arabic references.

Arabic words punctuate individual poems: maut, death; shukran, thank you; Inshallah, Allah be willing; sadiq, friend; ashban, ghosts; mihrab, gateway to paradise; milh, salt; and jameel: beautiful. I found myself 'acquiring' them, holding them close as I read on. The opening poem, entitled 'A Soldier's Arabic', starts: 'The word for love, habib, is written from right / to left, starting where we would end it / and ending where we might begin'.

Despite the accumulation of detail, sensory and imaginative, as well as military, Turner's language has an economy and eloquence. There are short poems, which explode in your brain, shock your system out of complacency and there are long, filmic narratives, which guide you through the gruelling detail and routine of 21st century military action on the ground.

Entwined with the metal and fire power, the danger and brutality, is the complexity of the human relationships between soldiers in life-threatening situations, between soldiers and civilians, and between soldiers and themselves, notably Brian Turner himself, as well as a sense of the larger human and political canvas.

If you have followed events over the years, the war will have made Iraq 'familiar' through media representation. In contrast to mediated news values and political manipulations which routinely serve to filter and control information and understanding, here the minutiae of lives and bodies, the vulnerability of soldiers, 'insurgents', 'terrorists', the general population; the experience of invasion, war, terror, fear, loss, bereavement, yearning, madness and mourning are 'refreshed' and given emotional power and resonance sufficient to justify and renew the purpose of poetry: to deter 'deadness' of heart and mind, in a media-saturated, consumerist environment; to shock not as a means to market share, but to keep us functioning as sentient beings, feeling and caring.

These are poems bound not just to poetry, but to the turmoil of lives and politics. They burn, hurt and leave us altered, countering the voyeurism explicit in western culture. Turner shows not just that it can be done in the 21st century, but that it must be done, by poets.

Towards the end of the book is the poem Sadiq:

It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient
because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.
SA'DI

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.

These are not poems for skimming between coffees. This beautiful writing provides a slow, demanding read (and re-read): unsentimental, without sensationalism or self-indulgence. The emotional density and power of the writing never descends into self-regard or obscurantism. Compelling and ultimately life-affirming, this collection reminds us what humans are capable of at the limits of experience: horror, hope, memory, affection and poetry, for example. Brian Turner's complex identity, as American soldier and poet, and as a 'survivor' of sorts, yields hybrid writing: testimony / critique / art. There is a tenderness that runs through these poems, which is our lifeline as readers.

Printer friendly page

Sorry Comments Closed

Comments are closed on this article