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Phantom Noise

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You don't need to have read Here, Bullet, Turner's book that burned up the peace poetry world a couple years ago, to read this book; but I'm grateful to have this update on the state of his craft and his mind. Brian Turner is an honest, straightforward poet, not ashamed of what he knows and trusting enough to share what he has experienced. What he does best is demonstrate how he takes his particular array of experiences--all his experiences, physical and psychological--and makes some sort of sense of them. There's no preaching, no pretense here. I'm sure I'd learn a lot from his classes in creative writing, but I'm even more certain that I've enjoyed his side of our epistolary relationship, held up through his poetry. In my unrelenting encouragement of new poets to let the 19th century poets speak for their century and accept the challenge of representing your own century, Brian Turner and a handful of others (such as Seth Abramson, Tony Hoagland, Patricia Smith, and others) are exhibit A for how to do it successfully. (And I'm grateful to find another poet who seems to be as haunted by the metaphorical weight of the Mogul destruction of the great library of Baghdad--"and the river ran black with ink"--as I am.)

Around-the-world-solo-sailor Reese Palley wrote, "Our world is only peopled by what is inside our heads." Is it so unusual, then, for combat veterans to have their world peopled by horrors few who have not been there can understand? In his poems, Brian Turner captures the struggle of the human brain as it tries blend inhuman war experiences into every-day living. A phantom noise is the result, a background noise that is always present and is sometimes oddly dominant at the damnedest times. His beautifully crafted poem, "At Lowe's Home Improvement Center," gives us the returned combat veteran reacting to the common sights and sounds of a typical American hardware store, sights and sounds that uncontrollably trigger the common sights and sounds of war carnage.

These poems don't condemn. They don't preach. There's no paean to patriotism here, nor - God forbid - glory. There's only the clean, crisp, English line stating blunt facts with vivid imagery, with a beauty and an acceptance that allows Turner to put inside our own heads what it must be like to be ripped from civilization, sent through hell, and then returned to civilization, our world newly peopled with demons we can't cast out. Ever.

Powerful stuff, these poems. Leaders who must send us to war should read them before doing so to understand the full measure of the butcher's bill that will be paid.

Brian Turner's poetry can't help bring to mind the poets of the First World War: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke. It's not just that Turner writes about "war, and the pity of war" like Owen, but that no other major poets have done so since the Great War. Where did the poetry of WWII and the Korean War go? I have read one poem written about the Vietnam War--an unpublished poem by my father. So Turner's poetry is at once novel and grounded in tradition--the tradition of bypassing the temptation towards the lugubrious or the nationalistic when dealing with war, and confronting the horror and pain with unflinching resolve.

The title poem of the volume is a good example:

Phantom Noise

There is this ringing hum this

bullet-borne language ringing

shell-fall and static this late-night

ringing of threadwork and carpet ringing

hiss and steam this wing-beat

of rotors and tanks broken

bodies ringing in steel humming these

voices of dust these years ringing

rifles in Babylon rifles in Sumer

ringing these children their gravestones

and candy their limbs gone missing their

static-borne television their ringing

this eardrum this rifled symphonic this

ringing of midnight oil this

brake pad gone useless this muzzle-flash singing this

threading of bullets in muscle and bone this ringing

hum this ringing hum this

ringing

I like how the thread of tinnitus unites a series of impressions and memories to the point where the unceasing roar stands in metaphorically for the strife and pain.

Specific connections to First World War poets arise poem by poem, connected by particular subjects and concerns. But whereas Sassoon observes post-traumatic stress disorder (he would have called it "shell shock") in general terms, Turner focuses on the fractured first-person impressions of a returned soldier.

Survivors

S. S.

No doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strain

Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.

Of course they're "longing to go out again,"--

These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk,

They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed

Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,--

Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud

Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride...

Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;

Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

Perimeter Watch

B. T.

I lock the door tonight, check the bolts twice

just to make sure. Turn off all the lights.

Only the fan blades rotate above, slow as helicopters

winding down their oily gears.

Water buffalo

chew the front lawn, snorting. When the sprinklers

switch on, white cowbirds lift up from the grass

with heavy wing-beats, a column of feathers

rising over my rooftop, their wing-tips

backlit by the moon.

Through Venetian blinds

I see the Iraqi prisoners in that dank cell at Firebase Eagle

staring back at me. They say nothing, just as they did

in the winter of 2004, shivering in the piss-cold dark,

on scraps of cardboard, staring.

[...]

Brian Turner, like Sassoon and Owen, excels at personalizing experience and alluding to generalities through specifics. In Phantom Noise we get a wide slice of this experience, ranging from guarding prisoners to a panicked stampede at al-A'imma Bridge, from a VA hospital to childhood memories.

Turner clearly has respect for both valor and mercy; he treats the people and cultures involved in the Iraq War with understanding and insight. One poem, "Stopping the American Infantry Patrol Near the Prophet Yunus Mosque in Mosul, Abu Ali Shows Them the Cloth in his Pocket" is no war poem--simply a poem borne of the tensions and misunderstandings between cultures alien to each other.

Through it all, Turner remains reserved. He shows but does not tell, so that while he speaks in the voice of a soldier, a father, a lover and a passing observer, he only alludes to any grand statement or unambiguous opinion. He never writes, as Sassoon does,

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you'll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

Part of my wishes he would. Part of me is glad that he doesn't.

American Internal

Down in the hole, down in the clay and mud,

we dig. The noon sun hot on our backs

as we bend to the task, as if digging

down into our own shadows

with the stained shovels of our hands,

digging until someone gasps--another,

they have discovered another; with pale eyes

the dead faces are rooted among worms and stone,

the brassy shells of bullets in their mouths.

We raise each one carefully out of the earth,

men dressed in sandals and thawbs,

wet cotton robes dyed by clay,

and women, like the one I lift now,

how her hair unravels in a sheen

of copper, cold as water in my palms.

Zach Hudson

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