Brian Turner
Here, Bullet
2005 Beatrice Hawley Award Winner
Alice James Books

Turner has composed an insightful mosaic of life during wartime in his first book of poetry, Here, Bullet. Turner's natural curiosity is evident in his painting of wartime Iraqi life from various perspectives: from the point-of-view of male and female U.S. soldiers, an insurgent suicide bomber, medics, local merchants, civilians, and a Kurdish man. His language has the surprising exactitude of care combined with the freshness of events that outpace imagination. Turner enlivens these events like a flame touching a wick.

Turner completed an MFA from the University of Oregon before embarking on a military career, including serving in Bosnia in 1999, and participating in the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Here, Bullet is anchored in a reserved, deadpan voice of Turner, a soldier who feels that death is his constant companion, not a breeder of reptiles of the mind as in anxious late Victorian poetry.

Turner’s stoic soldier’s perspective sometimes leaves a reader wondering what Turner thinks beyond what he documents. Turner offers compassion for those being killed regardless of who they are, but not judgment. This stoicism may seem harsh. Still, it is less harsh then some fellow soldiers described in the poem “Body Bags,” who survey dead bodies and kick them, saying “Last call, motherfucker. Last call.”

In addition, Turner’s stoicism is more reserved than the apparently real-life Army Private B. Miller, who in the poem “Eulogy,” “pulls the trigger / to take the brass and fire in his mouth / because if only for a moment the earth is stilled.”

Turner’s point-of-view tightropes survival. He sets the tone of his book’s opening poem “A Soldier’s Arabic”:

Where we would end a war
another might take as a beginning.

This is a language made of blood
It is made of sand, and time.
To be spoken, it must be earned.

In “The Baghdad Zoo,” Turner notes what many newspapers have noted about the initial 2003 invasion, that the U.S. military he was part of protected oil, but not people.

Tanks rolled their heavy tracks
past the museum and up to the Ministry of Oil.
A gunner watched a lion chase down a horse.

And in another stanza:

An Iraqi northern brown bear mauled a man
on a street corner, dragging him down an alley
as shocked onlookers shouted and threw stones.

Turner records his own government’s unwillingness to protect Baghdad’s “museum,” protect the “shocked onlookers,” or control the zoo, but does not opine. He comes home with a deep sympathy for people, and he abides alongside death. It is a nearness he keeps close to his vest but also shares with readers. He writes in “The Hurt Locker”:

Believe it when you see it.
Believe it when a twelve-year-old
rolls a grenade into the room.
Or when a sniper punches a hole
deep into someone’s skull.
Believe it when four men
step from a taxicab in Mosul
to shower the street in brass
and fire. Open the hurt locker
and see what there is of knives
and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn
how rough men come hunting for souls.

Above, Turner combines in one scene a child (“twelve”), a soldier (“sniper”), and likely a gang of terrorists or militia (“four men”) to show a portrait of violence that spans across borders, nationalities, and terminology in a dystopic, contemporary world.

His craft punctuates the violence by following iambic lines of scene-setting with hard-hitting trochaic lines of action. Therefore, the first two lines that start with “Believe” are iambic trimeter and then tetrameter. The horrific violence of “rolls a grenade,” “deep into someone,” and “step from a” all start with trochees, which put the stress on the first syllable, accentuating the harsh violence of “roll,” “deep,” and “step.”

“Open the hurt locker and learn,” Turner asks us. Then a machine-gun follows with four stressed syllables in the last line (in the second through fifth slots) to convey what he likely witnessed through metrical onomatopoeia. Turner has craft.

What Turner doesn’t reveal is his own opinion about this still controversial war. He implies death is his friend, and displays sympathy for all. Turner does not explore deeper questions such as what motivates war, or what sparks social violence, as Robert Bly does in his Vietnam-era book The Light Around the Body. Turner’s poetry is closest to Vietnam veteran and poet Bruce Weigl’s clarities of line and description in Weigl’s selected poems, Archeology of the Circle. However, Turner excludes Weigl's self-investigation. Turner simply tries to document what war is.

II.
From reading this book I gather Turner sees himself as ‘an army of one,’ to quote the U.S. Army slogan. Yet this self-identity almost implies the life of a mercenary. Turner’s poetry may be the first substantial reflections of an individualist soldier in an era past the age of nationalism, today caught up in the age of globalization where words like “citizen,” “nation,” and “sides” mask urban chaos, global market politics, and brutal human motives.

His attention is his abiding credo. In “Iraqi Policemen,” he writes:

The shocking blood of the men
forms an obscene art: a moustache, alone
on a sidewalk, a blistered hand’s gold ring
still shining, while a medic, Doc Lopez,
pauses to catch his breath. . . .

Turner himself has composed an “obscene art” in Here, Bullet. Now living in California, I wonder what Turner remembers more. Scenes like above, or as he writes in “Curfew”:

Today, policemen sunbathed on traffic islands
and children helped their mothers
string clothes to the line, a slight breeze
filling them with heat.

(A shorter version of this article appeared in The Baltimore Review: Summer / Fall 2006.)