In case you missed it, there was an excellent interview with US warpoet, Brian Turner, discussing his memoir, My Life As A Foreign Country on Radio New Zealand’s Sunday Morning programme yesterday.

The interview focuses on Brian Turner’s experience in the US military in Iraq and Bosnia. To hear the in-depth interview, which is well worth your time, click on:

US Poet, Brian Turner, On Sunday Mornings

Earlier, Brian Turner’s experiences resulted in two acclaimed poetry collections: Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise.

I am a great admirer of the poetry contained in these collections, which I have featured on two occasions. The first poem featured was AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem) from Here, Bullet:

“Thalia Fields lies under a grey ceiling of clouds,
just under the turbulence, with anesthetics
dripping from an IV into her arm,
and the flight surgeon says The shrapnel
cauterized as it traveled through her
here, breaking this rib as it entered,
burning a hole through the left lung
to finish in her back, and all of this
she doesn’t hear…”

At the time, I offered the following commentary:

“I first heard of Brian when I was driving to one of the Autumn Poetry Readings of the Canterbury Poets’ Collective in 2009 and tuned into a public radio documentary on contemporary war poetry. Brian Turner was one of the featured poets and I heard his poem ‘AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)‘ for the first time.”

I found the poem deeply moving because of that connection it gives us to the frail humanity of Thalia Fields who is “about as far from Mississippi//as she can get.” Currently, I am slowly working my way through the Here, Bullet collection and it is full of poems that make that same connection. These poems are about the war in Iraq and the key adjective I would use to describe them is “observational.”  The poems observe, record, note, but make no judgments outside of the personal—leaving the reader to make up his or her own mind on the subject of this war, its brutality and its human cost. In this sense, I am finding it war poetry in the tradition of the First World War poet, Wilfrid Owen, who wrote: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

To read the full poem and commentary, click on:

AB Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)

Subsequently, I also featured VA Hospital Confessional on the Tuesday Poem Blog:

“Each night is different. Each night the same.
Sometimes I pull the trigger. Sometimes I don’t.

When I pull the trigger, he often just stands there,
gesturing, as if saying, Aren’t you ashamed?

When I don’t, he douses himself
in gasoline, drowns himself in fire.

A dog barks in the night’s illuminated green landscape
and the platoon sergeant orders me to shoot it.

Some nights I twitch and jerk in my sleep.
My lover has learned to face away…”

The commentary included the following :

“I felt, both on first hearing and subsequent reading, that it had the element I most look for in writing of any kind, which is what I call ‘heart.” In the poem I heard the note that I believe resonates in all great art and reaches out to the listener, the reader, or the viewer: that depiction of what NZ poet, Dr Glenn Colquhoun, has described as the “ache” of our human condition.

Part of that depiction may be gritty reality, another part may be compassion—both qualities that I found in Brian Turner’s first collection Here, Bullet…Brian Turner’s second collection, Phantom Noise, is still war poetry, but this is no longer the poetry of the combat zone but of its aftermath, that return to civilian life where the experiences of war, even when the individual tries to keep them locked down, still bleed into everyday life …”

To read the full poem and commentary, click on:

VA Hospital Confessional

Again, to hear yesterday’s in-depth Sunday Morning interview, check out:

US Poet, Brian Turner, On Sunday Mornings

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Brian Turner served for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq, from November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999-2000 he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division. Born in 1967, he received an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before joining the army. His poetry was included in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with a feature-length documentary film.

Brian Turner’s latest book, My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir has been called “Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful” by Nick Flynn and “a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature” by Tim O’Brien. His collection Here, Bullet (Bloodaxe Books, 2007) was first published in the US by Alice James Books in 2005, where it has earned Turner nine major literary awards, including a 2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. In 2009 he was given an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship. His second collection, Phantom Noise, is published by Alice James Books in the US and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK. It was shortlisted for the 2010 T S Eliot Prize.

To read more about the poet and Phantom Noise you may also enjoy the following article that appeared in The Guardian newspaper in October 2010: “Brian Turner, words of war.”