Here, Bullet Book

There can't be anything beautiful about war, can there? Why then is Brian Turner's poetry so beautiful? How can he choose words which soothe and comfort at the same time they break our hearts?

Finding Brian Turner and Yusef Komunyakaa as a result of reading Kevin Powers' Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting: Poems and his transcendent The Yellow Birds was the most rewarding thing that happened to me this Spring. Finding them may also have the longest lasting impact of anything else that has happened. Time will tell.

It is difficult to imagine Turner as a soldier. Did he stand still in a street exploding, capturing pictures through the shutters of his eyes? Did he turn a phrase on a curling tongue while listening to a command, standing at a barricade, or licking his lover? His eyes are old eyes, and he reaches further, deeper: Alhazen of Basra

If I could travel a thousand years back
to August 1004, to a small tent
where Alhazen has fallen asleep among books
about sunsets, shadows, and light itself,
I wouldn't ask whether light travels in a straight line,
or what governs the laws of refraction, or how
he discovered the bridgework of analytical geometry;
I would ask about the light within us,
what shines in the mind's great repository
of dream, and whether he's studied the deep shadows
daylight brings, how light defines us.

Turner's eloquence stems from a sensitivity so fine that the lines fairly quiver. In 2000 lbs. each stanza imagines the lives of victims of a car bomber, many of them blameless Iraqis with lovers, fathers, sisters, not forgetting to add the sound of the detonation's aftermath. The buffeting wave washes over us and leaves us with a vivid sense of smell.


Sadiq

It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient
because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more. --Sa'di

It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in a desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle of its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.