Some responses to Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet
Stuart Pickford
I admired Here, Bullet a great deal. It dealt with a very difficult subject without lecturing or taking sides, the majority of the time. The focus was on the human tragedy of war and the victims on both sides. It captured the obvious futility of war, the technological American forces who were unable to defeat the enemy they often could not see and the personal histories of those involved. The surreal and crazy aspect of war is also present: the escaping animals from Baghdad zoo, the rusty ferris wheel at the pleasure complex and the soldier, Lt. Jackson, blowing bubbles just before he loses both hands to a bomb:
The civil affairs officer, Lt. Jackson, stares
at his missing hands, which make
no sense to him, no sense at all, to wave
these absurd stumps held in the air
where just a moment before he’d blown bubbles
out the Humvee window, his left hand holding the bottle,
his right hand dipping the plastic ring in soap,
filling the air behind them with floating spheres
like the oxygen trails of deep ocean divers,
something for the children, something beautiful… (2000 lbs)
Here in ‘2,000 lbs,’ Turner captures the incongruity of war, blowing bubbles out of a Humvee, literally, a vehicle of war. It is an act of imagination and kindness, while also, perhaps, being part of his remit as civil affairs officer. The run-on lines capture the incomprehensibility of what has happened to him; the verbs “stare,” “make” and “wave” take emphasis and seem dislocated from their objects, capturing the sense of shock Lt. Jackson is in. Figurative language is use sparingly as the raw details are shocking and effective in themselves. Therefore, when the comparison with “deep ocean divers” occurs, the reader is struck by its contrast. Before the explosion, sound seems muffled and, for a second, actions seem to be in slow motion.
More generally, Turner’s style is clearly poetic while also being, at times, conversational and authentic for the characters’ point of views represented. The specific names and places add a sense of realism. A lot of the collection is written in the first person capturing the personal locus of the collection. I did not feel this compromised the objectivity of the point of view; realistically, a serving American soldier might find there are difficulties in adopting the perspective of an Iraqi. As motifs, Turner used light a great deal and also some biological/anatomical references to the brain and the body. The former I assume is due to the difference in the environment and weather and how that distorts perception. With the latter, I wondered if this was from seeing so many injured and being aware of and knowing the injuries. However, I felt, on a few occasions, that I would have liked this motif to have occurred less frequently.
More specifically on style, I sometimes thought there was some redundancy: in ‘Milh,’ women are “dressed in black/the color of crows.” Also, in ‘Dreams from the Malaria Pills (Barefoot),’ we are told the shrapnel is both “jagged and rough.”
Occasional telling occurred as if the reader would not be able to work out the implied message. At the start of ‘Dreams from the Malaria Pills (Turner),’ it reads: “This time is beautiful.” The evidence for this was then delivered. Likewise, in ‘2000 lbs,’ one of the most successful poems in my view, the woman seems to deliver the moral of the poem in her direct speech on page 45. I know it was the woman speaking, but I wondered if the poet was taking liberties with her to deliver what the poet wanted to convey. ‘Katyusha Rockets’ also ended with a bald statement: “ the bravest thing I have ever seen.”
Finally, on the critical side, I thought sometimes there were short phrases that were inserted to locate time and space that were not needed. In ‘Hwy 1,’ in the last stanza, we are told “and when…” This is capture the conversational tone, but I thought that putting one image hard against another would be as successful. Similarly, in ‘The Leupold Scope,’ the phrase “to find” could have been replaced by a colon or the two words could just have been omitted. Enough of the quibbles.
‘The Al Harishma Weapons Market’ is a fine poem. However, it begins with a bit of a cliché: midnight. The simile that the gun seller treats the weapons like a musician would a trumpet is telling: one for destruction, one for art. All the specifics of people’s names and gun types are there. The way Akbar, the gun seller, is compromised as neither black marketer or insurgent is thoughtful and shows there are no easy equations in war. His tenderness to his son was moving. The last images of the stars in the sky and on the child’s ceiling works on more than one level. The “dark places” are of the sky and the soul. Here and in other poems, Turner handles direct speech realistically and sometimes in a way to progress the narrative.
‘AB negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)’ I also admired. As in many poems, the medical terminology is used realistically. The overall situation struck me as unusual and compelling. To be in a surgical/medical plane close to the clouds was unexpected as a setting and made the most of symbolically as Thalia Fields is so close to death at the start. Again, I wondered about the narrator being a little heavy-handed with people speaking “gently and with care,/a comfort to her on a stretcher.” Is that second line needed? This poem is also set at the significant time of midnight. Midnight occurs in the last line too! The whole poem is one sentence to attempt to capture the dreamy and surreal sense of what is happening, everything connected and smoothly linked with simple conjunctions. That said, the semi-colon after “drown in” could have easily have been a full stop and perhaps should have been as the point of view changes. As mentioned before, there is a little overt telling with “the most beautiful colors…” I admired the way the narrative worked when Thalia Fields died as it happened almost without us noticing, calmly and conversationally to some extent. The detail about the grieving surgeon is poignant near the end of the piece.
‘Ferris Wheel,’ from the end of the book, looks at one of the settings slightly more than the fate of the characters. Turner handles contextualizing narrative and moving it on with ease. As they trawl the river for bodies from a helicopter, they discover other unexpected victims of war, a policeman and a student. As this is happening, a cook hold the bodies of fish, lifting and weighing them, a physical parallel to what is happening in the main plot. This is an event that will escape history, except for this poem presumably. The ferris wheel is rusted “like a broken clock.” It is an event outside of time and beyond the normal measure of experience. I was struck by the last image of time as the river in which the two service men drowned. However, it is a pity that the river had already been described as “cold” earlier in the poem. I think both adjectives, cold and unstoppable—which river isn’t?, is over doing a fine piece.
Interestingly, my seventeen-year-old son has just walked in with a copy of the film, The Hurt Locker. I will make interesting viewing. I have offered a swap and recommended Turner to him. Here, Bullet I think is to be admired because of its gritty realism as well as its poetic skill.
