Steve Sawyer reviews Fred D'Aguiar's Continental Shelf
Rosemary Badcoe reviews Andrew Greig's As Though We Were Flying
Suzie Evans reviews Tomas Tranströmer's The Deleted World
Matt Clegg reviews Philip Levine's Stranger to Nothing
Fay Musselwhite reviews the book our group discussed in August, Don Paterson's Rain.
Suzie Evans reviews Jo Shapcott's Of Mutability, our July choice.
Noel Williams reviews Phantom Noise by Brian Turner.
Continental Shelf – Fred
D’Aguiar (Carcenet Press: 2009)
Fred
D’Aguiar was born in England to Guyanese parents in 1960, and lived
in Guyana from the age of 2 to 12. He trained as a psychiatric nurse
before studying African and Caribbean studies at Kent University. He
is the author of prize-winning novels including The Longest
Memory, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award (Pantheon:
1994). Continental Shelf is his first full-length
collection of poetry since Bill of Rights (1998).
Continental
Shelf was written while teaching at Virginia Tech
University. At the heart of the collection is ‘Elegies’, taking
the form of 139 poems, mostly meditative sonnets, responding to the
massacre of 32 students by a fellow student, at Virginia Tech in
2007. The author met the student who carried out the massacre, and
taught some of the students killed.
Continental
Shelf presents the massacre not as an isolated outrage, but
rather as a grotesque symptom of a social order permeated by
violence, both domestically and in terms of interventions on a world
stage:
I
wish I were making this up,
But
this is history and fact,
Intermingled,
that says don’t fuck
With
us unless you have thick skin
And
broad shoulders, we flick a whip
Measuring
time in waves and particles.
We
keep prisoners for life in cells
Of
their own making and we celebrate. (CS: 83)
The
collection is at its strongest when dealing with the sense of
loss, the personal and group disarray and disarrangement in the
aftermath of the massacre.
I
want our children so safe I’d
Wind
the clock until they were unmade
and
separated in our separate bodies;
Yours
and mine ... (CS:
114)
There
is the wonderfully observed tribute to one of his students, Erin
(Queen of basketball):
Her
without question, not for what she said,
But
how she makes it sound like some
Thing
that was there waiting to be said.
Something that
once said cannot be denied. (CS: 117)
The
description of the panic attack the author experiences on a morning
run at the sight of two men approaching speedily in a large vehicle
is memorable:
And
I glance behind and see the dirt cloud
From
too much speed on dry mud …
…
Past
names and dates and brutal acts
Left
to fester in me …
…
History
owns me, but owes me nothing.
History
passes me in cities like a stranger. (CS:
89 – 90)
Dream-like
reveries and musical vignettes act as perverse interludes between the
narrative poetry, to analogize the numbing sense of derangement,
confusion, and insecurity experienced:
Handclap,
backslap, stilettos rap on ground
Not
the sound of a gun
Knuckle
crack, July 4th fireworks by the ton
Not
the sound of a gun (CS: 120)
The
flower/bouquet metaphor, albeit a timeworn cliché, is handled with
skill and still shocks: ‘In my dream I see a man who hands out
flowers to everyone he meets’ (CS: 91, 92). The language, for the
most part, is agile and fluid, accessible and engaging,
notwithstanding the platitudes: ‘You are a bride now and death is
your bridegroom.’ (CS: 55). There are
‘mother’s multiplied loaves and
fishes’, and ‘waters of distress into wines’ (CS: 70). These
indulgencies do not detract from the many arresting images, metaphors
and lines in the ‘Elegies’: ‘A wedding cake of sound’, and
‘tent slashing rain’, come to mind as I write, and:
… please
let me be for one stanza,
Pure
as the reign of peace on a Tibetan mountain,
Easy
as cottage smoke, true as light from a stained
6.
Moon
leaning in a bedroom window to form
Lake
Placid on that Scotchguard carpeted floor. (CS: 80)
‘Elegies’
is furious and calm, fast-paced and somnambulant, defiant and
desolate. It is also overly long, and as a result, loses some of its
power. There are so many detours, and fresh departures: childhood
fishing, a stolen cycle, a naked woman opening the door on a
childhood paper round, a wheel passing the poet by on the highway,
orange juice spilt on his computer and the humanoid IT intervention,
to name several. Some of these departures are enjoyable, but there is
a feeling of overstretch, a sense of teetering on the brink of
psychodynamic entropy. These disintegrative tensions are no doubt
intended, and the reader certainly shares the author’s sense of
anomie and bewilderment. Even so, the poem would benefit from the
greater focus and economy of materials that a less expansive
approach would bring. At times the writing feels rushed and
undercooked, at other times overwrought.
The
companion poems to ‘Elegies’ in Continental
Shelf, ‘Local Colour’, take us
across continents to childhood in Guyana and through adolescence,
with the emphasis on memory, and imagination, formative events and
relationships. Poems like ‘Shell Pond’, ‘Railway’, ‘Caiman’,
‘National Cycle Championships’, and the wonderful ‘House not a
Home’, are fast-paced, and luminous, with beautiful rhythms, and
the composure and surprise of a master storyteller. D’Aguiar takes
us to what sounds like a childhood to die for: the Caiman (or
alligator) mistaken for a log to step on; a snake in the Tamarind;
water-fights while climbing the rafters; the obligatory near-death
experience; unforgettable characters and deeds of the folklore –
all wonderful materials for a poet, and D’Aguiar does them justice
in the better poems of ‘Local Colour’:
It
whistles a battle cry,
Steam
from the engine a mood
…
Double
oxen, hoof stomp, temper
Tantrum,
stampede, clatter
Matter,
head splitter, hear us,
Stooped
with an ear to the line –
greenheart,
mora, baromalli,
purple
heart, crabwood,
kabakalli,
womara. (CS: 09)
That
said, even these do lack the penetration
and depth of the best work in ‘Elegies’. Poems like those
aforementioned serve as enjoyable companion pieces, as well as
autobiographical context for ‘Elegies’; the weaker ones are
somewhat patchy, overwritten, and feel like ballast.
D’Aguiar
raises the issue of the role, and relevance of art in the face of
such tragic events, not least since he has a laudable response to his
self-confessed feelings of callous indulgence:
Art
imitates life in so far as during
The
poem’s making there is no other
Place
for the artist to turn but life:
What’s
made stands for the living we did then,
Or
might have done if we did nothing. (CS: 108)
Continental
Shelf does not amount to doing
nothing in spite of D’Aguiar’s heartfelt agonistics, and
bewilderment; it is a substantial and courageous meditation on
violence in advanced capitalism, which debunks the birdseed rhetoric
and polemics of mainstream treatments.
We
export death better than we manage it
on
the domestic market. A massacre on campus
stuns
us the way a suicide bomber in Baghdad
Can
never do … (CS: 66)
Continental
Shelf feels even more urgent and
relevant as the news from Denver Colorado filters through of yet
another senseless massacre. ‘Elegies' reminds us that violence is
always political: never for free. We all pay a price, feel the pain;
nobody gets home unhurt, if you make it home at all.
Steve
Sawyer
Andrew Greig As Though We Were Flying, 64pp, £8.95
Bloodaxe Books, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland, NE48 1RP
Andrew Greig has been described as one of the leading writers of his generation, a Scottish poet acclaimed for his writing on climbing and 'high-risk situations'. His latest book from Bloodaxe is split into three sections: Home for Now, The Light of Day and A Moment’s Liberty. The style is generally free verse, sometimes in couplets or triplets, but often following the natural breaks of thought. Greig’s language is straightforward, concentrating on phrasing and lyricism. Running through all the work is a strong sense of Scots cadence and vocabulary.
There's no comment on the book’s divisions, but Home for Now captures a sense of growing up and living in a particular place, whether the tight-knit coastal community of Fife or less permanent stays in Ontario or Sheffield. Characters such as Alex Watson, the fisherman who never liked the sea, recur in life and finally death and populate the narrow streets and coastal fringes. These poems relate the rituals, both human and natural, of place and then pull back into wider reflection. The section ends with the longer two-part poem Wynd, a portrait of a teenager’s search for ‘the life to come’ amongst the cramped streets and boredom of his home town – 'we grew up provincial, in the heart of the world' – and his astonished discovery of wider horizons via the encouragement of a girl named Holly:
In those days you knew little more
than differential calculus and irregular verbs,
but you knew what came next would be
definitive as Sunday in the shrouded town.
Salt in the rain on her full mouth.
than differential calculus and irregular verbs,
but you knew what came next would be
definitive as Sunday in the shrouded town.
Salt in the rain on her full mouth.
(Wynd)
The Light of Day and A Moment's Liberty move into more personal territory and continue his earlier explorations of life and mortality. There is the feel of time moving on, of the poet bearing witness to his own life while seeing it in the wider context
Glance at the world you're passing through,
small fry with Time pressing on your neck
small fry with Time pressing on your neck
(Nine Steps to the Shed)
yet always with a sense of joy that he is here at all, that there is still love to wake to in the morning, and knowing that it is almost enough.
Wanting nothing more but more of this,
the place that they must leave,
they would lie a while, drifting,
her world-defining hand uncurled on his.
they would lie a while, drifting,
her world-defining hand uncurled on his.
(Married Lovemaking)
These are poems of appreciation of life and of connection to others from a man who has realised how fleeting it all is. A Resurrection of a Kind suggests that we imagine we and our loved ones are already dead; then realise how good it is that we still live:
Now greet your beloved.
She's dead too
and her brief return
is the biggest lottery win ever.
…
Her eyes, her smile,
her skin meeting yours -
how beautiful the dead are
while we live.
She's dead too
and her brief return
is the biggest lottery win ever.
…
Her eyes, her smile,
her skin meeting yours -
how beautiful the dead are
while we live.
(A Resurrection of a Kind)
These are almost all personal poems, populated by I and we, written with gentle tenderness and wit. The overall impression is of uplifting and thoughtful work from a poet thankful for how fortunate he is.
Rosemary Badcoe (originally published in Antiphon #2, at: http://www.antiphon.org.uk/index.php/issue2-interval/63-i2-review-three )
Tomas Tranströmer, The Deleted World
Versions by Robin Robertson, Enitharmon 2006
Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, according to the Nobel Prize website, "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality". His poetry collection The Deleted World is a great example of this. A short collection of short poems, the poetry to be found it inside it is beautiful and succinct, with no words wasted.
Tranströmer's poetry has a timeless quality. Nowhere in these poems will you find anything more time-specific than a car, a city, occasionally a TV screen or radio. Although the poem Island Life 1860 talks about washing clothes in a lake, and a man dying of smallpox, the world of this poem does not seem too distant from the other situations in the collection. This is not ultra-referential, postmodern poetry and this is perhaps what leads to its success in translation.
The imagery in these poems is startling and the sound of the words carefully considered. The poem Autumnal Archipelago, for example ' The walker comes upon the ancient oak: a huge / rooted elk'. This stunning use of metaphor is something I already associate with Robertson's work, his collection The Wrecking Light, for example, is full of startling comparisons.
Tranströmer's subject matter is seasonal, often wintry, and sets individuals and their relationships in a world commanded and controlled by nature. In the poem Solitude a car on an icy road loses control, leaving the driver to consider everything that he might leave behind 'My name, my girls, my job, all slipped free and were left behind'. His survival is merely due to chance 'some helpful sand, or a well-timed gust of wind'- a reprieve from nature's brutality. These poems investigate the significance of human events, simultaneously highlighting the powerlessness of people in their environment.
The poem Winter Night opens with the line 'The storm puts its mouth to the house / and blows to get a tone'. A storm blows through The Deleted World itself, the natural world asserting itself, unsettling and endangering the occupants, and the collection resonates with a tone of its own, eerie and subtle, with elegant imagery that invites repeated re-reading.
The review ends with one of my favourites from the collection, a fine example of the quiet, arresting imagery and pared-down verse typical of Tranströmer.
Our phonecall spilled out into the dark
and glittered between the countryside and the town
like the mess of a knife-fight.
Afterwards, all night jittery and spent in the hotel bed,
I dreamt I was the needle in a compass
some orienteer bore through the forest with a spinning heart.
Stranger to Nothing, by Philip Levine.
Philip Levine has been described by Neil Astley as ‘the authentic voice of America’s urban poor’. He was born in Detroit in 1928, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Levine began writing poetry as a teenager before the end of the Second World War, and published his most recent collection in 2010 at the age of 82. He has lived through important chapters of American history, notably The Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the assassination of J.F. Kennedy and the Ronald Reagan Administration. Levine seems to have been influenced by several schools of poetry – the romantics, the modernists, the confessionals, and the deep-image poets – but has remained outside cliques and factions. A great deal of his poetry reflects back on when Levine worked as a labourer in Detroit, work he abandoned at the age of 28. Another portion elegises family, friends and communities from that time. It was a great pleasure to receive Levine’s collection, The Mercy, as a present in the late 90s, and my appreciation of this poet has only grown after reading and re-reading Stranger to Nothing, the Bloodaxe edition of his selected poems. Anyone interested in poetry that is personal, political and, above all, human and humane, should enjoy this volume.
Levine’s 1991 poem What Work Is employs a narrative technique typical of the poet. Apparently autobiographical, at no point does it employ the first person singular. Opening with the first person plural it decisively shifts to second person singular in line 3:
‘You know what work is – if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you…’
At this point you’d expect the poet to introduce the first person singular in order to strike his authentic note - the kind of approach Charles Bukowski might employ. Levine defies that expectation. Experience that presumably happened to the poet years ago is related as if it is happening to the reader in the urgent present. It is as if Levine were adopting the inclusive spirit of Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’. Equally, it sets up a structural irony. Chances are Levine regards the experience of waiting in the rain for factory work as one the typical reader of poetry will be unfamiliar with. What knowledge is Levine trying to impart through this? The poem uses the word three times. First we have the assertion in line 3. Then in line 19 it gives us:
‘…the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, ‘No,
we’re not hiring today’, for any
reason he wants…’
How are ‘we’ expected to feel about this? The poem doesn’t say. It hurries us on with a stream of thought about another man ahead of ‘us’ in the line. This man looks like ‘our’ brother: could be ‘our’ brother but is not. There is something hard to get to grips with about this seemingly direct poem. Is it playing with the bond of trust between writer and reader? We could feel taken into the author’s confidence if we read the poem as something Levine is trying to tell us about his own life.
On the other hand, if we take it as an experience the author is trying to give us through the medium of the poem, surely we are likely to feel out of our depth, certain only of the fact that we are in the dark as soon as the hypnotic voice of the poem stops whispering in our ear. This creates a tension, which is increased through the question the poem asks ‘us’ and the (qualified) answer it gives ‘us’ to that question. This is a question about love, about why a man does not express the love he feels for his brother. Levine subverts the masculine clichés of so-called dirty realism.
This poem about authentic knowledge is also a poem about authentic ignorance. Yes, we have ‘our’ likely ignorance of blue-collar work. Are we not also being given the young man’s ignorance - even the young Levine’s ignorance - that the real ‘work’ of a life is learning how to express love for other human beings? The poem is a collection of mixed and unstable intentions. One of them may be to provide a Bukowskian jolt to the privileged reader. Another seems to draw on a deeper sense of tenderness and self-questioning humility. I don’t feel the ending quite resolves these different intentions, but I’m not sure that it should be asked to. Perhaps it would relieve too much of the compelling tension held by the poem.
This poem about authentic knowledge is also a poem about authentic ignorance. Yes, we have ‘our’ likely ignorance of blue-collar work. Are we not also being given the young man’s ignorance - even the young Levine’s ignorance - that the real ‘work’ of a life is learning how to express love for other human beings? The poem is a collection of mixed and unstable intentions. One of them may be to provide a Bukowskian jolt to the privileged reader. Another seems to draw on a deeper sense of tenderness and self-questioning humility. I don’t feel the ending quite resolves these different intentions, but I’m not sure that it should be asked to. Perhaps it would relieve too much of the compelling tension held by the poem.
‘The Great Truth’ (2004), seems to consolidate more of Levine’s themes and techniques. It inhabits past, present and future all at once. Like ‘What Work Is’, it is preoccupied with masculinity and what a life of hard labour can do to a man. It offers a journey from innocence to experience that builds towards revelation. Its title makes it an obvious partner to (the much anthologised) ‘The Simple Truth’.
I’ll focus on linked but contrasting moments in the narrative. They reveal the structural symmetry of the poem. In stanza 1 the 11-year-old Levine accompanies the household lodger on a walk in a public park. This man is ‘back from prison, penniless / and working murderous night job in the forge room / at Cadillac.’ At this age Levine believes there are ‘answers’; that one day this man will communicate to him something about manhood; that he (Levine) will experience a revelation that will raise and transform his understanding and experience of the world. We are to infer he was disappointed. Stanza 2 shifts time again. The adult Levine encounters this man in a bar ‘on Linwood / with a woman anxious to leave.’ The man is unable to recognise Levine, and after being prompted is only able to “put his head down on the bar, [close] his eyes, and [say], ‘oh my God, oh my God’, and nothing more.’ Ironically, this man’s failure to find language expresses more about life and time than words can easily convey. Moment 2 occurs immediately following this. Levine is visiting the park again. It is raining. He walks on alone and stands under some trees:
I’ll focus on linked but contrasting moments in the narrative. They reveal the structural symmetry of the poem. In stanza 1 the 11-year-old Levine accompanies the household lodger on a walk in a public park. This man is ‘back from prison, penniless / and working murderous night job in the forge room / at Cadillac.’ At this age Levine believes there are ‘answers’; that one day this man will communicate to him something about manhood; that he (Levine) will experience a revelation that will raise and transform his understanding and experience of the world. We are to infer he was disappointed. Stanza 2 shifts time again. The adult Levine encounters this man in a bar ‘on Linwood / with a woman anxious to leave.’ The man is unable to recognise Levine, and after being prompted is only able to “put his head down on the bar, [close] his eyes, and [say], ‘oh my God, oh my God’, and nothing more.’ Ironically, this man’s failure to find language expresses more about life and time than words can easily convey. Moment 2 occurs immediately following this. Levine is visiting the park again. It is raining. He walks on alone and stands under some trees:
‘Up ahead what little I could see of sky
lightened as though urging me towards something
waiting for me more than half a century, some
great truth to live by now that it was too late
to live in the world other than I do.’
The power of these lines depends on their relationship to the boy’s first inkling of revelation under the sky. What failed to materialise then, now threatens to materialise ‘too late’. The sense that there is a greater truth to live by remains, but whatever Levine has experienced in the half century between moments has created the man he must resign himself to be. This grounds revelation in a sobering relationship to the passage of time. Whilst we wait for our vision of truth, quotidian experience shapes us beyond our capacity to change. This makes ‘The Great Truth’ something of an anti-revelation: an old man’s re-evaluation of the romantic paradigm. Levine’s sense of history, of narrative, refuses to let him privilege the so-called timeless lyric moment.
Could there be a political subtext here too? Levine’s describes his old house sitting ‘waiting for JFK / to come back from Dallas and declare a new / New Frontier...’ Arguably, America has not recovered from the loss of innocence that was Kennedy’s assassination. ‘The Great Truth’ was published in 2004 - Levine’s first collection after 9:11 and 3 years into the Bush administration. Could Levine be implying that America, too, might have passed beyond the capacity for change? This would give a dark twist to Fukuyama’s notion of the end of history. Is Levine implying that change and regeneration must be left to the young, to those less exhausted by experience of history?
Could there be a political subtext here too? Levine’s describes his old house sitting ‘waiting for JFK / to come back from Dallas and declare a new / New Frontier...’ Arguably, America has not recovered from the loss of innocence that was Kennedy’s assassination. ‘The Great Truth’ was published in 2004 - Levine’s first collection after 9:11 and 3 years into the Bush administration. Could Levine be implying that America, too, might have passed beyond the capacity for change? This would give a dark twist to Fukuyama’s notion of the end of history. Is Levine implying that change and regeneration must be left to the young, to those less exhausted by experience of history?
‘The Great Truth’ is a visionary poem that scrutinises the epiphany and the visionary paradigm. Levine has revealed himself to be one of America’s most retrospective poets: obsessively winding and unwinding the threads of time. He validates experience, transforms it, re-evaluates and interrogates it. He reminds us how long it can take us to come to emotional terms with our own lives. As a poet reaching the height of his powers in later life, he has shown us how, with age, we come to inhabit past, present and future differently – how the layering of years and memories create the ‘knowledge’ we live by. His work remains an ongoing process: ‘you start with a truth and you break through to a deeper one’. Stranger to Nothing demonstrates that maxim.
Matt Clegg
Don Paterson: Rain
Faber and Faber, 2009
There is much to draw you in to Don Paterson’s most recent collection. The territory is universal, the poetry heartfelt and skilfully turned, the intimacy expertly managed.
Separation and loss are spoken of throughout. These are raw for the poet, expressed as both the growl of a creature trying to protect an exposed wound, and white fury at something which, however angry you are at it, still refuses to change. The book is in memoriam of Michael Donaghy and features the seven part sequence Phantom which contains the most palpable and emotionally wrought lines in the volume, as Paterson directly addresses his friend and has him reply.
The bereavement theme merges compellingly with that of lost children. In the poem Miguel, it is an adult voice who sits ‘on the old patio / beside your absence. It is a black well’, but this distress is played out as a child’s game gone too far, a plea for a brother’s return to stop their mother worrying. Elsewhere a helpless father is too far away to prevent his son being taken from a swing in the park, so evoking in the just-vanished, a tick or sickening feeling that if only the speaker were quick enough or looked in the right place then the lost brother or friend could be found and brought back.
Perhaps the deepest separation is between the book’s protagonist and the world that surrounds him. Always a lone observer, he wakes early to nurse his Lie, and stays up late to sift through ‘the dull things of the day’ giving each a chance to shine. Drawn to watch a scene in the romance between the sea and sky he feels the guilt of an intruder and turns away fearing retribution. This distance isn’t new for Paterson but seems more intense here, as if he feels its moment has arrived. In The Bathysphere, he puts himself behind the glass eye of the thing so that any earthly encroachment ‘came slowed and lowered as through a dream of water’, and only after travelling beyond the earth is he free to truly marvel and engage.
The book is full of full rhymes, which can be wearing at times though, as you’d expect from such a master of his craft, never feel clunky or forced, but neither do they delight, disturb or further any course of contemplation. They seem more to do with the door locking effort in The Lie, and the bald assertions that frame the collection; and perhaps a reluctance to admit more than a glimpse of the tear-bright things is natural and understandable.
There are some engaging similes here, such as the moon over the sea ‘as on a polished shelf’, and the ‘goblin-like economy’ with which the child is snatched. However, while the sentiments and philosophies referred to in these poems promise so much and are not difficult to grasp, invitations to linger and delve deeper are frustratingly rare.
Fay Musselwhite
Jo Shapcott: Of Mutability
As can be imagined, Of Mutability is a collection that deals with change and mutation. Jo Shapcott's poems show a fascination with the human body and the way it inhabits and adapts to its environment. Decay, ageing and illness are all addressed, for example in Abishag in which the narrator nurses a dying partner; 'only his dear / old man's skin between us, so thin it might melt / against my breasts'.
A recurring motif is the idea of the body and its boundaries. People's thoughts can be observed through the skin of their bald heads. Bodies melt and take on aspects of the world around them, as in St Bride's 'carrying inside me every morning's news'. Images of water and fluid are used to great effect to enhance this idea of a flow and changeability which affects not only landscape but the body and mind. The reader, too is expected to metamorphose; 'reader, you're an owl /for this moment' (Night Flight from Muncaster).
This is Shapcott's first collection in twelve years and although it comes after her recovery from cancer it deals with her illness only indirectly, refusing a sentimental approach. The poet writes about the fragility of life, the perfect conditions in which it must be sustained, in several poems including Deft:
'Just a matter of squirting water onto water
without snapping the surface tension until liquid
surrounds a skin of air, surrounding liquid. My body's
a drop of water'.
This delicate tension is what separates the body from its surroundings, holding apart life and death. It is also representative of poetry as a delicate structure requiring skill and balance to create.
Shapcott also uses an enjoyably whimsical sense of humour in her work, for example Tea Death where tea spouts from it's characters' belly buttons 'like the outward breaths of whales'.
Of Mutability is a fine collection which uses ordinary, everyday language effectively to express the idea that everything that exists, animate or not, is mutable. It leads the reader on a metamorphic journey, through bodies, landscapes and crashing stock markets where the only constant is change itself.
Suzie Evans
Phantom Noise: Brian Turner
Brian Turner's second volume navigates similar terrain to Here, Bullet. The landscape of the first volume is Iraq. In the second, the midwest of the USA turns out to have a similar landscape. The first comes from the soldier's eyes, out of Turner's daily experiences, writing poetry in the evening as a respite from a day of weapon-toting. His follow-up brings war into the streets of America, the post-traumatic experiences of the new civilian still fighting in mental deserts. The prevalent image, set up in the first book, but almost a refrain in the second, is fire falling on ordinary streets: the missile fired in Iraq that lands in Illinois. Every returning soldier is such a missile, and the poems of Phantom Noise are in the voices of those soldiers: war, fire, death in the aisles of Walmart and around the baseball diamond.
These are poems of passionate experience. They can be truly intense, perhaps even harrowing for some readers, putting the reader in the soldier's place. They're not necessarily about post-traumatic stress. Some are merely about the stresses of having been through trauma, or the stresses of no longer having to deal. But they're also about the stresses of the social order: the poems suggest that ordinary life in the western world is built on war, interpenetrated by violence, intimately connected with alien and alienating acts in alien places. Quite literally, Turner brings war home to us.
The poems of violence and conflict are occasionally relieved by more domestic or biographical pieces (I think we can assume they are biographical. It would almost defeat his object if he were "imagining" an American childhood, rather than reliving it). By not mentioning the war, Fawlty-esque, he brings it to our attention all the time. Small phrases which would otherwise be unnoticed in the "domestic" poems show us the connections between (if we want to separate ourselves) everday life in the USA and warfare or (if we want to be more truthful, so less protected) the essential connections between all our daily lives and violence.
What's the impact of this work? It's the sort of poetry all should read and more should be writing. Poetry that makes you think as well as feel, drawn from personal experience, but aiming to have some more powerful effect than simply recognition or the quiet nod of acceptance. Of course, being driven by passion, there are moments where you wish the poet had been a tighter editor of his work. But is it reasonable to edit out the rough, give us a better poem by simplifying things, make the shape perfect, when the subject is quite simply that the world is not like that? Arguably the weaknesses of the poems at a technical level strengthen them as messages: you can't help but know a real man wrote these from his real terror, real fear, real confusion, real pain, real desire to make us respond.
Noel Williams
