Lines From the Front

Eschewing violence and vitriol, Here, Bullet’s poetry puts a human face to both sides of an endless war 

By Kate Lebo

It’s easy enough to find modern poetry that has great style. What isn’t easy is finding a book that feels like it truly matters, like you’re reading something that would punch you in the gut if it had arms, and that could very well show up on school syllabuses fifty years from now.
 
Here, Bullet by Brian Turner is a book like that. In 2004 Turner served as a sergeant in the Iraq War and wrote the first drafts of his poems in his wartime journal. Here, Bullet, his first collection, is direct, vivid, and not neutral so much as empathetic to all the people caught in the violence of this war. In his New York Times blog, “Home Fires,” Turner explains that “if we learn who the dead are and what they were like, if we allow the dead their own unique humanity, we risk the possibility of being overwhelmed by loss. I believe that, as a country which has initiated war, we have no right to do otherwise.” His poems put faces and names to the numbers and headlines that have numbed us to the losses of four years of conflict. It probably won’t surprise you, then, that Turner’s poems can be emotionally difficult to read.
 
This book is different from the bulk of current war poetry because it isn’t consumed by the question of “Why are we here?” It doesn’t dwell on the political subterfuge that started the war, or the indignation and despair we might feel because of it. In Turner’s poems, that we “are here” in Iraq is a given; he asks the next question, which is “how do we cope with being here?” In “Body Bags,” in the first section of Here, Bullet, a soldier is standing over a pile of Iraqi dead. It isn’t clear whether he (or she—Turner doesn’t specify) has been directly involved in the shooting (it could’ve been the work of insurgents), but he’s implicated in the horror just by being there. However, what’s striking about the poem isn’t the way it metes out blame. The dead “look as if they might roll over,/wake from a dream and question us/about the blood drying in their scalps…to ask where their wives and children are/this morning, and why this hovering/of flies.” In Turner’s surreal lines the dead don’t accuse the soldier, they question him. The soldier and the dead Iraqis he’s looking at are all surprised that death could come on this day, in this way. By proxy, the reader is surprised too.  
 
That’s what makes these poems important: they can help us emotionally participate in the war. Anyone can predict that tomorrow’s headline will have violence in it, but most people don’t think that violence will happen to them. That’s a basic and human way we cope, and that’s one of the reasons that statistics and headlines don’t have the deep impact of poems like Turner’s. His poems transcend politics and take you where TV cameras can’t go: into the hearts and minds of the people at the front lines.