Brian Turner

In Here, Bullet Turner shows himself to be a genuine war poet – in the tradition of Li Po and Wilfred Owen. In stratified language rich in imagery he conjures up the horrors of war. One of the poems has the form of a funeral oration for a fellow soldier who takes his own life: “Private Miller has found what low hush there is / down in the eucalyptus shade, there by the river.” In another poem he typifies the absurd chaos of Baghdad by writing a poem about the animals that have escaped from the ruins of the zoo: “One baboon escaped the city limits. / It was found wandering in the desert, confused / by the wind, the blowing sands of the barchan dunes.”

In the title poem from the collection we are sucked into the feelings of a soldier in combat in a hair-raising way. The soldier speaks. He addresses the bullet that threatens him and personifies it: “If a body is what you want, / then here is bone and gristle and flesh.” In lines short and sharp like machine-gun fire, he shouts out his courage and anger: “And I dare you to finish / what you’ve started.” But the reader constantly feels how a fear of death is hidden beneath all that shouting: “each twist of the round / spun deeper, because here, Bullet, / here is where the world ends, every time.” [Brian Turner was a guest at the 2009 Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam. This text was written for this occasion.]

Bibliography

Here, Bullet, Alice James Books, Farmington, ME, 2005
(republished in UK by Bloodaxe Books, Manchester, 2007)

Talk the Guns, Alice James Books, Farmington, ME (forthcoming in 2010)