Brian Turner : Observation Post #71

(Georgia Review)
Balad, Iraq

Owls rest in the vines of wild grapes.
Eucalyptus trees shimmer.
And from the minaret, a voice.
Each life has its moment. The sunflowers
lift their faces toward dawn
as milk cows bellow in a field of trash.
I have seen him in the shadows.
I have watched him in the circle of light
my rifle brings to me. His song
hums in the wings of sand flies.
My mind has become very clear.

@

The next few days will be taken up with Thanksgiving celebrations. I am on a flight from Chicago to Philadelphia (layover at the Ron Silliman airport, Terminal Q, if people want to stop by), and then from Philadelphia to Islip, so I'll have some concentrated time to look out the window and think about the big things: if this plane explodes, do I really want to leave that rather snarky review of Reginald up? And if not, should I contact my lawyer?

Turner has just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq; he was in one of the Infantry's Stryker brigades, and all of the work that appears in the latest issue of the Georgia Review centers around the details of that experience. Turner also has a book out by Alice James, a press I generally think makes some excellent calls.

I am torn in two directions by Turner's work. I'll say at the outset, with the proviso that Turner is definitely one seriously tough man, that some of it fails, or, to be more precise, that some of the work fails on its own terms.

Turner's goal, both overt and in the fabric of it, is to hide himself, to disappear in the face of events of unimaginable violence or pathos, but there are definite moments here where the voice of Turner appears in a noisy and distracting fashion. I'll take one moment here where that happens, from "The Al-Harishma Weapons Market":

Black marketeer? Insurgent?
What does it matter? An American death
puts food on the table, more cash
than most men earn in an entire year.

The cloying questions here are the first to break the spell; even worse, the question is raised, only to be dismissed. The read, in other words, is short-circuited as we are told (or led rather heavily to infer) that it doesn't matter. But doesn't it matter? It surely matters to the man in question, so it must not matter instead to Turner himself. That we are watching things heavily filtered through Turner's vision is clear in the next lines, with a string of unworthy clichés and metonyms that even I think the New York Times would steer clear of.

In general, I think Turner's mis-steps come not from his own failures, but from the failures of some of the forms and modes he has adopted in order to "speak" poetically. Regular rhubarb readers (triple-Rs) will I'm sure be aware that I am strongly opposed to the idea that there is a mode, or a set of modes, that poetry should be written in. It is clear from reading the title poem of his Alice James book:

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.


that someone has convinced Turner that he wants to sound like Louise Gluck. I do not want Turner to sound like Louise Gluck. I want Louise Gluck to sound like Louise Gluck, and I think Turner's content here is bursting at the seams of these baroque sentences.

But we're not meant to be talking here about Turner's mistakes elsewhere, but what is going on in what I think is his best poem from Georgia's pages. The convolution of the Middle East and war to me brings me right back to Ezra Pound in the Cantos, with his weird compilations of ancient and forgotten battles. To Pound, I think, in his Pisa-addled brain, these wars were still going on. Here, in Turner's work, it is going on, right now. We want to read this on under the rubric of the daily news.

The quiet, unostentatious "rest" of the owls rings true to me; it is precisely in the neutralness of this word that the neutrality of the scene exists. The "shimmer" is veering slightly into self-conscious territory: do we ever talk about things shimmering unless we want to make an impression?

The success of this poem is indeed in the extent to which is can present the most charged content — shooting a man — as a neutral event of an impassive universe. And then, reflexively, to disown this neutrality in an assertion of the speaker's humanity: in other words, the poem deploys the very charges that will be its undermining.

It is that "circle of light" that brings us, focuses us, down onto this point. Again, in contrast to the noisy anatomy of "Here, Bullet", this little emptied-out phrase is doing double duty here for me. It is, in its cliché, recalling the now clichéd images we receive on the television of live-video charges into Iraqi bomb-building dens.

But it is also hooking into that very American kind of democratic or better demotic spirituality: at the same time as it executes the metaphor, it brings it down. It upsets on two levels: on the surface, the target of a rifle is anything but a "circle of light"; below, it chills in its misuse of terms.

Since we're going word by word, let's finish on that "very". Again, I think, the power here is coming not from the words in isolation, but from the ways in which Turner is taking terms from the wider culture and drafting them into service in a very ambivalent poem. And it is that "very" there, again, recalling the hortative sensibility of the American, of the American need to assert bigness, actuality, directness, here authenticity. A member of the school of Gluck — and I am wrecking on Gluck here, but I actually like her work a great deal — would read that last line and blue-pencil the "very" on some misguided notion of concision. But it is in that "very" that the power of Turner's move survives.

OK all — have safe Thanksgiving travels. If I can get some Wifi on my trip, there'll be more up in the next few days.