~EDWARD BYRNE~
WALKING
AMONG THEM: BRIAN TURNER’S PHANTOM NOISE
One of the ways Brian Turner has responded
to his history,
as a soldier at the battlefront who returns home, has been
to explore in his poems various experiences encountered
in a war zone and to examine the enduring emotions evoked
by them. Indeed, early in his new collection of poems,
Phantom Noise,
Turner reminds readers of how frequently
soldiers encounter an inability to leave behind the traumatic
images and dramatic experiences of war.
After Brian Turner’s first book of
poetry (Here, Bullet: Alice
James Books, 2005) concerning contemplations about the circumstances
surrounding war was published, many readers discovered that the
collection contained marvelous works exhibiting a poet-soldier’s
individual and vivid images. Written in concise lines of poetry that at
times appear intimate yet often also maintain an ability to present a
bit more of the differing perspectives of other Americans or Iraqis
ensnared by the circumstances of combat and survival, the poems
frequently offer personal considerations and experiences that somehow
have struck a widespread interest and have assumed a somewhat greater
public significance in the handful of years since their release.
Turner, who served seven years in the U.S. Army,
including tours of duty in Bosnia-Herzegovina and then Iraq, is also an
MFA graduate from the University of Oregon’s creative writing program.
With Here, Bullet Turner
followed in the footsteps of other American writers who have eloquently
recorded emotionally charged front-line observations during a time of
war. Indeed, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, and Tim O’Brien seem among
the primary influences on Turner (the Vietnam War poems of Bruce Weigl,
Yusef Komunyakaa, and John Balaban surely also play a part). In
interviews Turner has acknowledged a debt to O’Brien’s works
(especially Going After Cacciato),
and like O’Brien in his fiction, this poet often focuses on details
that lend a persuasive sense of authenticity or authority to the voice
in the poems, even when pieces involve fanciful scenes or surreal
dream-like narratives.
Recognition of Hemingway’s influence appears early
in the book, as a quote from Papa opens the initial poem: “This is a
strange new kind of war where you learn just as much as you are able to
believe.” Throughout the poetry in Here,
Bullet Turner displays his attempts at understanding the
conditions in which he, his fellow soldiers, and the Iraqi citizens
must endure day after day in order to survive. He wants to believe the
terrible sacrifice of lives will be worth it in the end; however, by
the final poem in this volume readers witness indications Turner has
lost all hope the cost of the war will be warranted, let alone rewarded
by a better future.
Like the wounded Harold Krebs in Hemingway’s
“Soldier’s Home,” who comes back from combat and reads books about his
battlefront, seeing in them a different war than the one he
experienced, Turner’s speaker in “Ferris Wheel” comments: “The history
books will get it wrong.” Nevertheless, one of the most important
characteristics of this volume remains Turner’s almost complete
avoidance of any overtly political commentary or editorializing,
reserving his sole focus for the presentation of powerful actions and
clearly depicted individuals, allowing readers, if they wish, to form
their own opinions on political concerns or controversial issues.
Admirably, Turner tries to offer different versions
and to identify distinct visions of the events related throughout the
book by learning various aspects of local language, customs, and
religious beliefs. The speaker in these poems desires a way to
understand and empathize with those whose country is caught in the
crossfire of conflict. Indeed, in published comments Turner has voiced
great admiration for the writings of Balaban, particularly Remembering Heaven’s Face, a memoir
about his relationships with the Vietnamese people he met — learning
their language, literature, and culture — during a time in which he
volunteered to work in the war zone even though he’d been granted
conscientious objector status. Readers can appreciate Turner’s
compliment to Balaban just as they also may appreciate the
complementary elements in each author’s approach to the subjects in
their writings.
Some of the poems in Here, Bullet seem like contemporary
camp scenes reminiscent of the Civil War campfire poems by Walt
Whitman, as soldiers are portrayed in ordinary circumstances while on
base or enjoying a lull after curfew. In “Cole’s Guitar” Turner’s
language most closely resembles Walt Whitman’s voice when he catalogs
images of America evoked by the sound of a comrade’s six-string. “I’m
hearing America now,” Turner writes as he lists various everyday events
he imagines taking place back home. By the final lines of the poem
(which is recorded as taking place in Al Ma’badi, Iraq), Turner’s
speaker reveals seeing strangers’ faces “the way ghosts might visit the
ones they love, / as I am now, listening to America.”
Although, as with almost all first books of poetry
(perhaps one could just as easily say “all books of poetry”), there is
a selection of poems that clearly stand as the strongest in this
collection, a number of compelling compositions that draw the reader
from the opening piece introduced by the Hemingway quote through to the
closing work in the book. However, one poem in Here, Bullet deserves to be
identified not only as an outstanding work in this volume, but also as
one of the finer pieces by any poet in recent years. “2000 lbs.” is a
poem that freezes in time the moment a terrorist suicide bomber
triggers his explosives in a town square of Mosul. In sectioned
passages of the poem, Turner provides readers with brief profiles
introducing some of the victims in the blast — what they are doing,
what pasts they have experienced, whom they love and by whom they are
loved, what hopes for the future they hold, where they are headed —
when their lives are suddenly and shockingly destroyed.
Among the victims arbitrarily targeted are American
soldiers, as well as Iraqi men and women, including one old woman who
“cradles her grandson, / whispering, rocking him on her knees / as
though singing him to sleep.” Consequently, in addition to fixing in
time an isolated moment of horror in the center of a war zone, Turner
also aptly captures an iconic act emblematic of an entire period of
history. Few poems show such potential for moving readers so
emotionally while at the same time inviting intellectual and ethical
reflection, requesting that readers investigate the tenuous thread by
which any life hangs.
By the time readers reach the final poems in this
collection, they are left to consider unanswered questions similar to
those raised by the speaker of “Night in Blue,” thoughts that also must
linger in the minds of soldiers returning home from the war zone: “What
do I know / of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have / to say of
the dead — that it was worth it, / that any of it made sense?”
In an article, “To Bedlam and Back,” that appeared
in the New York Times last
October, Brian Turner wrote about the difficulties facing soldiers when
they make the transition from war to home. Even as a veteran, an
infantry sergeant who served both in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Iraq,
Turner questioned his own perspective on this issue: “I guess what I’m
wondering most is, as a country that is currently at war, how do our
veterans rejoin the life waiting for them back home? How do they rejoin
the tribe once they’ve been to Bedlam? How do we help them so that they
don’t feel as if they’re encased in glass, pinned to the walls as
specimens in some museum-house of culture? It’s a difficult question to
answer. I have trouble answering it myself.”
One of the ways Brian Turner has responded to his
history, as a soldier at the battlefront who returns home, has been to
explore in his poems various experiences encountered in a war zone and
to examine the enduring emotions evoked by them. Indeed, early in his
new collection of poems, Phantom
Noise, Turner reminds readers of how frequently soldiers
encounter an inability to leave behind the traumatic images and
dramatic experiences of war. Even when engaged in an everyday activity,
such as shopping at the local hardware store, a veteran seems haunted
by his past in a combat zone:
Standing in aisle 16, the hammer
and anchor aisle,
I bust a 50 pound box of
double-headed nails
open by accident, their oily
bright shanks
and diamond points like firing
pins
from M-4s and M-16s.
In a steady
stream
they pour onto the tile floor,
constant as shells
falling south of Baghdad last
night, where Bosch
kneeled under the chain guns of
helicopters
stationed above, their
tracer-fire a synaptic geometry
of light.
At dawn, when the shelling stops,
hundreds of bandages will not be
enough.
[“At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center”]
Similarly, in “Perimeter Watch” a soldier who has
returned home remains guarded against an imagined battlefield scene: “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.” He believes he can detect
water buffalo on his lawn, and when the sprinklers around his house
begin to operate, he thinks “cowbirds lift up from the grass / with
heavy wing-beats, a column of feathers.” The speaker confides:
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.
“Perimeter Watch” concludes with a brief but
compelling closing stanza: “When I dial 911, / the operator tells me to
use proper radio procedure, / reminding me that my call sign is Ghost 1-3 Alpha, / and that it’s
time, long past time, to unlock the door / and let these people in.”
Even in sleep, or perhaps especially in that state
when figures rise from the subconscious, the psychologically wounded or
searching speakers in Turner’s poems cannot escape the harsh memories
and emotional moments encountered in war. The opening of “Illumination
Rounds” introduces evidence of long-lasting damage:
Parachute Flares drift in the
burn time
of dream, their canopies deployed
in the sky above our bed. My lover
sleeps as Iraqi translators
shuffle
in through the doorway—visiting
as loved ones might visit a
hospital room,
ill at ease, each of them holding
their sawn-off heads in hand.
Later in the poem the lover finds Turner’s speaker
“at 3 A.M., shoveling / the grassy turf in our backyard, digging /
three feet by six, determined to dig deep.” The veteran tries to
convince his love that “the war dead” are still present, and he
attempts to get her to see them, “how they stand under lime trees and
ash, / papyrus and stone in their hands.”
Instead, she persuades him to halt his shoveling and
advises: “We should invite them into
our home. / We should learn their names, their history. / We should
know these people / we bury in the earth.” Nevertheless, in the
poem’s final section the speaker endures another painful flashback as
he drives the familiar roads in his home community:
I’m out on patrol again, driving
Blackstone to Divisidero, Route
Tampa
to Bridge Number Four, California
to the neighborhoods of Mosul,
each stoplight
an increment, a block away from
home
and a block closer to the August
night
replaying in my head.
By the time the poem reaches its end, the speaker
confesses to a continuation of his past trespassing on the present, as
he reports hearing “gunshots echoing years later, the incoherent /
screaming I’ve translated a thousand times over, / driving until I
finally understand / who it is I’m supposed to kill.”
The persistence of the past, including its seemingly
unending memories of misery and moments of despair associated with war,
is evoked through the book’s title poem in which the author employs the
technique of word repetition and the form of a single unpunctuated
stanza without any end-stopped lines, including the final one. The
“Phantom Noise” heard by the narrator consists of a constant “ringing
hum” he cannot avoid, one that echoes sounds so familiar from wartime
events: “bullet-borne language”; “ringing / shell-fall and static”;
“broken / bodies ringing in steel”; “ringing / rifles in
Babylon rifles in Sumer / ringing”; “ringing of midnight in
gunpowder and oil,” etc.
This ringing reminds the speaker of “children their
gravestones / and candy their limbs gone missing,” and he recalls the
“muzzle-flash singing this / threading of bullets in muscle and
bone.” The poem closes with little or no hope that the ringing will
ever stop, “this ringing / hum this ringing hum this
ringing hum this / ringing”
However, this remarkable collection of poetry
manages to move forward, to embrace the present despite the formidable
pull of past events. Indeed, Turner’s new book appears to display the
necessity for one to accommodate the past in the present as a way of
understanding that will eventually allow an advance into the future
with a greater degree of confidence.
Beyond the poems about Iraq and other recent events,
many of the works in Phantom Noise
are identified with specific time periods in the past, some personal
memories and others historical happenings, a few more distant than
others. “Homemade Napalm” features a “Winter,
1978” designation as the speaker relates details about his
father and grandfather in an era after a different war: “He drank
coffee, / saying nothing of my grandfather, / the Marine, Guadalcanal,
the flamethrower / carried on his back. He didn’t need to.” Another
poem, “Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon,”
begins in the same time period: “I drank a Seagram’s Seven and Seven on
7/7/77, / when I was only ten and my mom a bartender.” In the opening
lines of “Lucky Money,” the speaker declares: “It is 1971. / At Willie
Lum’s Hong Kong Restaurant / I’m four years old . . . .” Similarly,
“The Whale” starts with a childhood recollection: “It is 1970 / and the
summer of love is over. // I am three years old, barefoot, / running
along the surf / near Florence, Oregon.”
Elsewhere, the poet locates “.22 Caliber” in “1981.
The Soviets fight in Afghanistan.” Still, in a couple other powerful
poems Turner glimpses much further back in history for incidents and
information that might aid with an understanding perhaps necessary for
him to step forward into the future. In “Ancient Baghdad” the author
reveals intensity in the poem’s initial descriptions:
Ash blackened the sky in 1258,
blood
ran in the rivers of Dajla and
Farat,
the House of Wisdom burned to the
ground
and the caliph was trampled to
death by horses.
This was ancient Baghdad, July,
and hot.
After 50 days of siege and 40
days of plunder
800,000 lay dead in the streets,
beheaded
by Mongols, many bodies thrown to
the river.
Some hid in wells and sewers.
Later, they rose from the stench
to walk the wailing streets,
where wild dogs
slept with tongues panting,
bellies swollen.
“Al-A’imma Bridge,” an ambitious and extraordinary
poem in the same category of outstanding works as “2000 lbs.” in Here, Bullet, contains a number of
references as it travels through various stages “in history’s bright
catalogue.” Readers are reminded of “laser-guided munitions directing
the German Luftwaffe / from 1941, Iraqi jets and airmen from the
Six-Day War, / the Battle of Karbala, the one million who died fighting
Iran; // and Alexander the Great falls, and King Faisal, / and the
Israeli F-16s that bombed the reactor in ’81.” A number of other years
are included among the litany in this poem:
the year 1956 slides under, along
with ’49 and ’31 and ’17,
the month of
October, the months of June, July, and August,
the many months to follow, each day’s exquisite
light,
the snowfall in Mosul, the
photographs a family took
of children
rolling snowballs, throwing them
before licking the pink cold from their fingertips.
Years unravel like filaments of
straw, bleached gold
and given to
the water, 1967 and 1972, 2001 and 2002:
What will we
remember? What will we say of these?
The speaker even retreats again to the historic
moment mentioned in “Ancient Baghdad”: “the dead from the year 1258
read
from the ancient scrolls / cast into the river from the House of
Wisdom, / the eulogies of nations given water’s swift erasure.” Seeking
illumination concerning the human history of conflict through
examination of evidence left by those who have gone before us, Turner
seems to believe confronting sins of the past possibly can assist in
liberating individuals from pain felt in the present, especially as
they peer with uncertainty into a distant vista acting as camouflage
that conceals what the future may hold for them.
Despite the numerous descriptions of death or
desolation and images of despair one naturally expects to find in
recollections of war, Brian Turner also presents brief hints of hope in
his poetry. In “Helping Her Breathe,” a soldier tries to filter the
sounds of battle surrounding him (“Subtract each sound. Subtract it
all.”) as he assists a woman in childbirth. Following two stanzas in
which the speaker lists the noises of war — “decibels of fighter jets,”
“skylining helicopters,” “rifle reports,” “hissing bullets,” etc. — a
final pair of stanzas emphasizes the quiet moments in a woman’s labor
and “the hush we have been waiting for.” The closing scene in the poem
beautifully provides readers with a symbolic situation of life and hope
so rare in such conditions:
She is giving birth in the middle
of war—
the soft dome of a skull begins
to crown
into our candlelit mystery. And
when
the infant rises through
quickening muscle
in a guided shudder, slick in the
gore
of birth, vast distances are
joined,
the brain’s landscape equal to
the stars.
Turner also offers an exquisite example of lyrical
description in a poem titled “Eucalyptus,” which begins with an
epigraph quoting Harry Mattison: “The
grace of the world survives our intervention.” The tone
suggested by this statement seems apt as it is attached to a brief but
precise poem evoking the environment of Mosul at dawn — not just “the
brain’s landscape,” but the physical landscape of the countryside: “a
dense fog / hangs in the eucalyptus grove. / Water buffalo / lift their
heads from the belly-high grass, nostrils / wet and shining, to breathe
in the damp smell of the earth.” By the final lines of the poem, among
the trees, “shadows in the half light of dawn” appear to be “forms / of
men, women, children” in the new day’s illumination: “the small bright
lanterns of sunlight / breaking through the leaves above.”
As the collection nears its conclusion, a few poems
invite more optimism for the future even though darkness continues. In
“Study of Nudes by Candlelight,” the speaker again uses an image of
shadow and light as he remarks:
I can see from this day forward,
how you carry my shadow in the
gloss
of your skin, without complaint,
the promise
of light dripping from your
fingers,
your wine-dark nipples, my lips
kissing your own, farther and
farther away.
The volume’s penultimate poem, “In the Guggenheim
Museum,” introduces a narrator and his lover touring the art exhibits
along a curving ramp in the building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright,
itself an artwork. While observing those objects representing the past,
the speaker reminisces about a romantic moment the lovers spent
together in a park the night before: “a breeze might lift / the tips of
her hair, my fingers guiding / the zipper in its channel, tooth by
tooth, / the way it did last night, in the park, long after / closing
time when the sprinklers switched on, / and we didn’t stop.” With
thoughts of love and memories of passion, he seems to realize a renewed
desire to appreciate life:
this is what I’m thinking about
in the museum,
the skeletons of art hung around
us, petrified,
staring through the hard lenses
of framing and oil,
staring at us from their
fossilized stations
in the past, in wonder, marveling
at
these two lovers, here, each of us
fully given to the inexorable
process
of death, and yet, here we are
walking among them—alive.
Once more, readers are given an image of the speaker
in a poem aware that he is walking among evidence of the dead and his
own mortality; however, the recognition of life and the necessity of
taking advantage of all living offers, especially an opportunity for
love, are emphasized in the work’s italicized final word. Regardless of
the many instances of death and pain one may witness along the way,
perhaps even feelings of guilt, particularly in war, there are
significant reasons to rejoice in life and declare forcefully in
affirmation to the value of being alive.
Appropriately, “The One Square Inch Project,” the
last poem in Phantom Noise,
contains contemplation concerning some of the elements previously
encountered throughout the collection: life and death, love and loss,
light and shadow, sound and silence, past and present, the physical
landscape and the brain’s landscape, memory and understanding. One
might be reminded again of the influence of Ernest Hemingway—whose
epigraph began Here, Bullet —
and recall the meditative mood brought about by being alone among
nature in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” as the speaker of this
poem explores the deep and silent nature discovered in Olympic National
Park, following a footpath through “deadfall and leaf rot.” He declares
such a setting as “a type of medicine by landscape.”
The reader is placed amid startling scenery,
demonstrated through a series of delicate painterly descriptions:
“auburn leaves of mountain ash, variations of maple, / aspens in gold
and rust and creamy yellows — all given to memory, / hushed by the
green
work of water; moss, vines, forest canopy.” Suddenly, the speaker
shares a surprising comment, an admission especially difficult to
believe when delivered by one so eloquent, so perceptive and clearly
adept with poetic language: “there is not one thing I might say to the
world / which the world does not already know.” However, such a
conclusion allows for the book’s final passage, which acts almost as a
summary statement for the whole collection:
I sit. And I listen.
When I return
to California,
to my life with its many
engines—I find myself changed,
the city somehow muted, frenetic
and fully charged with living, yes,
but still, when gifted with this
silence, motions have more
of a dance to them, like fish in
schools of hunger, once
flashing in sunlight, now turning
in shadow.
Although back home, thousands of miles in distance
and years later in time, the speaker cannot leave behind the
experiences and emotions accumulated during his tours in a war zone. He
finds himself changed, acknowledging the presence of sunlight and
shadow, as well as the persistence of memory. Nevertheless, he must
move forward. Turner’s words in the New
York Times article quoted above
come to mind once more: how do our
veterans rejoin the life waiting for them back home?
How do they rejoin the tribe once they’ve been to Bedlam?
In “Jundee Ameriki,” a poignant poem that explains
the circumstances for a soldier who has returned to California after
having been wounded in an attack by a female suicide bomber in Baghdad
on a cold
afternoon in November of 2005, the reader learns how shrapnel still
must be surgically extracted at a VA hospital periodically: “Dr.
Sushruta scores open a thin layer of skin / to reveal an object
traveling up through muscle. / It is a kind of weeping the body does,
expelling / foreign material, sometimes years after an injury.” This
poem seems a sequel to “2000 lbs.” as it chronicles lingering physical
injuries in the aftermath of such an incident that might mirror the
emotional impact lasting long beyond a soldier’s return home from the
front. Just as much of Phantom Noise
blends the domestic and exotic, the present and the past with an eye
toward the uncertain future, many of this new book’s poems represent a
bridge back to those works in Here,
Bullet. These latest poems link the two existences that continue
together, often in conflict, in the minds of their speakers.
Like the soldier in “Jundee Ameriki,” Brian Turner’s
speakers continually reveal fragments of wartime memories and emotional
scars, bits of the past that rise to the surface long past the
wounding. Yet, each seems to learn a lesson, that the past must be
absorbed and understood before it can be brought to light and expelled.
Moreover, one must grasp the need to carry on despite the enduring pain
caused by such remnants, like he “who carries fragments / of the war
inscribed in scar tissue, / a deep, intractable pain, the dull grief of
it / the body must absorb.”
Brian Turner’s Phantom
Noise presents evidence once more of that powerful and
compelling voice with which readers first became acquainted in Here, Bullet. With this new
collection of poetry, Turner fulfills the promise so clearly
demonstrated in his earlier volume, and he adds greater depth to
readers’ understanding of the circumstances or emotional conditions in
which his personae find themselves, many inhabiting lives forever
influenced by experiences or individuals — including a number of the
dead — from the past and still directing much of their present state of
mind as the poems’ speakers walk among them in their memories.
As those personages in Turner’s poems continue to
seek
comprehension and continually exhibit compassion, walking among ghostly
figures to learn lessons from
the past and leading readers in contemplation about the present, they
also engage in the continuous task of looking forward toward a fragile
future, perhaps absorbing grief and moving ahead with some uncertainty,
but undoubtedly walking onward with hints of hope and helped by love. Phantom Noise is an enlightening
and intriguing contribution to contemporary poetry that reaffirms the
talent readers first observed in Brian Turner’s debut
book. This rich and resonant new volume proves Brian Turner now has
firmly earned a position as
one of the nation’s more valuable poets.
Phantom Noise, Brian
Turner. Alice James Books, 2010. ISBN: 978-1-882295-80-7 $16.95
© by Edward Byrne
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