War's Vista

In 2004, during one of the more violent periods in the Iraq war, a bomb exploded in a crowded square in Mosul. Brian Turner, an infantry leader in the United States army, illuminated the great costs of the destruction in a poem called "2,000 lbs."

Rasheed, passing by a bridal shop on a bicycle, "glimpses the sidewalk reflections/in the storefront glass, men and women/walking and talking, or not, an instant/of clarity, just before each of them shatters/under the detonation's wave." A lieutenant "stares/at his missing hands," having just "blown bubbles/out the Humvee window." And an old woman cradles her dead grandson, her heart broken.

Turner will read from Here, Bullet, which includes "2,000 lbs," and other collections Monday in Reynolda House, as part of the Dillon Johnston Writers Reading series at Wake Forest University. A reception and book signing will follow the reading, which is free and open to the public.

Vona Groarke, WFU's poet in residence, recommended Turner for the series, having read Here, Bullet, an acclaimed collection that came out in 2005, the year after his 11-month stint in Iraq had ended.

"His book has received an extraordinary amount of recognition, partly because of its subject matter but also because it is so well written," she said. "In many ways it's a very shocking book. It really brings home the reality of the experience of war in a way that journalism (can't).

"Journalism doesn't have that immediacy to it. But these poems do make you feel as though you're right there…He has a real skill with imagery that makes pictures out of the experience of the war and makes us see for ourselves what it might be like to be there."

In his review of Here, Bullet in The New York Times Book Review, critic Joel Brouwer suggested much the same thing. He wrote:

"The day of the first moonwalk, my father's college literature professor told his class, ‘Some day they'll send a poet, and we'll find out what it's really like.'

"Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon -- the war in Iraq -- and deserves our thanks for delivering in these earnest and proficient poems the kinds of observations we would never find in a Pentagon press release."

Turner, who lives in Fresno when he isn't on tour reading his poems, said that journalists "create this idea of objectivity and they pressure their language" to conform to it. When war coverage sticks so closely to the facts, he said, "one of the losses for a person back home is … some of the emotional content."

"We need to know the human content, what is being lost," he said. "The emotional content is really important. If we don't connect to that part, then how informed are our decisions?"

He cited several advantages to describing war through poems, as opposed to fiction or nonfiction prose.

He acknowledged, as critic Brouwer wrote, that his poems in Here, Bullet have a "hurried" quality.

"There is a rushed quality to some of the poems," Turner said. "But I think there's a value in that as well. Maybe, the reader can feel a bit of the urgency of the experience and (be) a little closer to it."

Poetry also suits the arbitrary nature of war, he suggested.

"A lot of what our culture hands down about war usually comes in the form of a narrative," Turner said. "The narrative is something I never found when I was there. For me, there was no narrative. Maybe higher up the ladder you can see a narrative.

"But in my small microcosm within the larger whole it just seemed like these sort of random, episodic events. Something would happen. I couldn't relate it to (what came before)….If I were a novelist, I'd think I'd have a lot of trouble with that."

Turner could well be following in the footsteps of several great poets who have written about war, including Wilfred Owen and Walt Whitman. He had been studying and writing poetry for several years before he enlisted, earning an MFA in the subject from the University of Oregon.

He said that he entered the military to honor a family tradition and to ensure a means of supporting his wife, from whom he is now divorced, and their son. All told, he was in the military for seven years, with the Iraq deployment coming near the end of his service. In Iraq, he was a sergeant who acted as an infantry team leader with the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division.

Turner said that fellow soldiers in his unit took to calling him "the professor" because he had taught some college courses and because he tended to use "big words." He said that they knew he was writing but didn't know what because he didn't advertise it.

"Nobody really asked me, ‘What are you writing about?'" he said. "Nobody cared. They might have if they had found out. I would assume they thought I was writing letters or a diary entry."

Turner described working on poetry during downtime between missions. The downtime might amount to 10 or 15 minutes before a few hours of sleep or for the better part of day.

"Some guys would play cards," Turner said, describing what happened during longer rest periods. "Some guys would be wrestling (or) working out in the gym. And I'd work on a poem."

These days, Turner is still working on poems about the Iraq war, poems that deal with "how it's being experienced here." He said, "I could write about other subjects and I will."

But then he recalls the "war dreams" that his grandfather still has about World War II. And the idea of removing the Iraq war entirely from his poet's system seems unlikely.

"The war goes the rest of their lives," Turner said, describing its effects on veterans and their families. "It may seem like it has ended. But it doesn't end."

■ Brian Turner will read his poetry at 7 p.m. Monday in Reynolda House, as part of the Dillon Johnston Writers Reading series at Wake Forest University. A reception and book signing will follow the reading. For more information, call 336-758-5150.

■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com.