Brian Turner's Here, Bullet is one of the first books of Iraq War poetry from an American soldier, and earns a place amongst the best of the world's military poetry. Poignant, lucid, and devastating, but essential for poets and non-poets alike.
"The poets are always right: history is on their side."
Bukharin to Stalin, 1934
Brian Turner, who holds an MFA in Creative Writing, served as an infantry team leader during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. "Here, Bullet" is his debut book of 46 poems representing his combat experience. The book’s cover depicts the near monochromatic geometry of a soldier who blends into the mid-ground of a desert, evoking the Cubist scheme of devastated landscape in Paul Nash’s painting, "We Are Making a New World" (1918). And like the Cubist rendering of that war-torn world, the people of Turner’s poems are melded to the canvas of war.
Turner selects no existential heroes as he probes the immense pathos of Iraq at war: “You hear the RPG coming for you. / Not so the roadside bomb.” Throughout, he forces us to face the terror: “Believe it when a twelve-year old / rolls a grenade into the room.” He even illuminates the suicide of an American soldier who “… has found what low hush there is / down in the eucalyptus shade, there by the river.” Elsewhere, a dying soldier has “just enough blood / to cough up and drown in,” while a civil affairs officer stares at his missing hands. In ‘Autopsy,’ a dead soldier’s heart is weighed by a mortuary affairs specialist who wonders how fast that heart once beat on the occasion of the soldier’s first kiss, no lovers in his future now save some sweet eulogist to toss a handful of dirt onto his coffin. Turner revisits some terrible paradoxes as in ‘The Al Harishma Weapons Market,’ where “an American death puts food on the table, / more cash than most men earn in an entire year… / There are men who earn eighty dollars / to attack you, five thousand to kill.” Still, in ‘Sadiq,’ “no matter what adrenaline / feeds the muscle its courage, / … it should break your heart to kill.”
Turner draws deep affinities with history. His epigrams include quotations from the Koran, Iraqi poets and proverbs, and Rousseau. As such, his thematic vision is broad as his poems work their visceral relationship to Iraq’s timeless landscape. In ‘Hwy 1,’ he reminds us that the invasion of Iraq was incipient in “the Highway of Death” of the first Gulf War, and even more anciently, along “/ … the spice road of old.” As well, a local man wounded in the 1980’s Iran-Iraq War attempts to cover a bullet-riddled wall with mud, “like dirt-filled sockets of bone which he smoothes over and over.” Poems like ‘Katyusha Rockets’ and ‘R&R’ portend how war will haunt the peacetime future of the veteran.
‘Observation Post # 978’ takes on the contradictions of unrequited sexual longing present in soldiers deployed in war. In ‘In the Leupold Scope,’ an evocation of the death of all transient creatures, a soldier scans the horizon for enemy positions, only to behold an Iraqi woman hanging laundry, knowing that she is one of many “women with breasts swollen with milk” who is essentially “… dressing the dead, clothing them / as they wait in silence.” Very often when Turner, as soldier-poet, is confronted by the war’s traumatic experience he is taken aback before its inhumanity, resulting in a bewildering déplacement in time and space. We see this exemplified through a particularly telling image in ‘The Baghdad Zoo,’ where an escaped baboon wanders the desert “confused / by the wind, the blowing sands of the barchan dunes,” a distantly hominoid metonymy of modern man’s endless reversion to atavistic violence. Turner does reminds us that there are brief moments of respite amid the withering toll on human life, as when a soldier—for once, “didn’t comfort an injured man / who cupped pieces of his friend’s brain / in his hands; instead, today, / white birds rose from the Tigris.”
The inscription of Turner’s experience as poetry is valuable, and readers are fortunate for what is likely the first printed volume of poetry to come out of the war. For this reviewer, the best poems are ‘A Soldier’s Arabic,’ ‘Here, Bullet,’— both peering into the poet’s psyche; ‘Easel,’ ‘Sadiq,’ and ‘To Sand.’ Still, "Here, Bullet" is a poignant and brutally lucid evocation of war and the terror of human contingency that reads like a daily battlefield Situation Report where we feel like the man in the Dostoyevsky story who is offered the terrible choice of being stranded on the precipice of a cliff, perched forever over solitude, storm, and darkness. "Here, Bullet" will surely take its due place in the canon of America’s noteworthy military poetry, works such as Dale Ritterbusch’s "Lessons Learned," Bruce Weigl’s "Song of Napalm," Walt McDonald’s "Caliban in Blue," and W.D. Ehrhart’s "Just for Laughs." But "Here, Bullet" is not simply a book poets need; the current proves it to be a book all Americans need desperately.
Jeffrey C. Alfier, a Southwest regionalist poet, divides his time between Tucson and Germany. In 2006, he received honorable mention for the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize. In 2005 he won first place awards from the Redrock Writer’s Guild of Utah and the Arizona State Poetry Society. He holds an MA in Humanities from California State University at Dominguez Hills. A former Air Force officer, he has also served as a functional analyst with Science Applications International Corporation, and once taught history as an adjunct faculty member with City College of Chicago’s European Division. A member of Poets Against War, he has been reviewing books of poetry for several years. His first chapbook, "Strangers Within the Gate" (2005), was published by The Moon Publishing and Printing, based in Tucson.
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