Book Review: Here, Bullet

I’d like to finish the week with one last review of the literature of war: Brian Turner’s widely acclaimed book of poetry, Here, Bullet. If you’re thinking to yourself what on earth could a book of poems possibly do to help someone cope with life after war then, you haven’t opened this collection. A MFA graduate of poetry before serving a deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina and the invasion into Iraq as an infantry team leader, some of Turner’s language that he crafts in Here, Bullet still lingers in my mind daily, even years after first reading this book. It’s become a part of me in a way; the poetics are that chilling and humbling.

I had a poetry professor who told me once that a good poem is a gift; you’re giving someone an experience, an emotion, a feeling they’ve never had, and you’re giving them a resolution or clarity and calm. “Believe it when you see it,” Turner writes in the poem The Hurt Locker, “believe it when a twelve-year-old rolls a grenade into the room. Or when a sniper punches a hole deep into someone’s skull… Open the hurt locker and learn how rough men come hunting for souls."

Feel that chill up your tailbone yet? In the poem called Eulogy, Turner writes lovingly of a fellow Soldier’s suicide, “It happens likes this, on a blue day of sun, when Private Miller pulls the trigger to take brass and fire into his mouth: … no mater what blur of motion surrounds him, no matter what voices crackle over the radio in static confusion … Private Miller has found what low hush there is … there by the river.”

While many of these poems are excellent narratives and disturbing recollections of suicide bombs and battle, Turner does veer to the high-brow state of modern poetry from time to time in this collection, and those poems are especially frustrating because of their inaccessibility. But like a sporting event where it’s the highlights and best parts that bring about the win, Turner’s Here, Bullet is by far the strongest poetry to emerge from the current conflict, a title that he might not lose for a very long time.

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