Soldier-Poet Brian Turner, Framing War In Verse
Soldier-poet Brian Turner. The New Yorker said his work "sidesteps the classic distinction between romance and irony, opting instead for the surreal." Alice James Books hide caption
Soldier-poet Brian Turner. The New Yorker said his work "sidesteps the classic distinction between romance and irony, opting instead for the surreal."
Alice James BooksSoldier Brian Turner is no silent witness to war. Instead, he used verse to chronicle his time in the U.S. Army, publishing a book of collected poems titled Here, Bullet.
Turner served in the armed forces for seven years. For one of those years, he was an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. He also served in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Here, Bullet was his debut collection; it won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award and was named a New York Times Editor's Choice.
Turner has also published his work in Poetry Daily, Atlanta Review and Georgia Review.
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Eulogy
It happens on a Monday, at 11:20 A.M.,
as tower guards eat sandwiches
and seagulls drift by on the Tigris River.
Prisoners tilt their heads to the west
though burlap sacks and duct tape blind them.
The sound reverberates down concertina coils
the way piano wire thrums when given slack.
And it happens like this, on a blue day of sun,
when Private Miller pulls the trigger
to take brass and fire into his mouth:
the sound lifts the birds up off the water,
a mongoose pauses under the orange trees,
and nothing can stop it now, no matter what
blur of motion surrounds him, no matter what voices
crackle over the radio in static confusion,
because if only for this moment the earth is stilled,
and Private Miller has found what low hush there is
down in the eucalyptus shade, there by the river.
PFC B. Miller
(1980-March 22, 2004)
Najaf 1820
Brian Turner reads "Najaf 1820"
Camel caravans transport the dead
from Persia and beyond, their bodies dried
and wrapped in carpets, their dying wishes
to be buried near Ali,
where the first camel
dragged Ali's body across the desert
tied to the fate of its exhaustion.
Najaf is where the dead naturally go,
where the gates of Paradise open before them
in unbanded light, the blood washed clean
from their bodies.
It is November,
the clouds made of gunpowder and rain,
the earth pregnant with the dead;
cemetery mounds stretching row by row
with room enough yet for what the years
will bring: the gravediggers need only dig,
shovel by shovel.
Ashbah
Brian Turner reads "Ashbah"
The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,
unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice
sounds from the minaret, a soulfull call
reminding them how alone they are,
how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,
leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.