Phantom Noise

Description

BRIAN TURNER
PHANTOM NOISE

Shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize

Brian Turner’s first book of poems, Here, Bullet, was a harrowing, first-hand account of the Iraq War by a soldier-poet. In Phantom Noise he pumps up the volume as he faces and tries to deal with the traumatic aftermath of war. Flashbacks explode the daily hell of Baghdad into the streets and malls of peaceful California, at the same time sending Turner’s imagination reeling back to Iraq. If he thought he had written all he could of his Iraq experiences in Here, Bullet, he was mistaken, for what he saw and felt there affected him so profoundly that more poems had to be written, years later, from a place of apparent safety.

Brian Turner writes a powerful poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty and skill. Like Keith Douglas’s poems from the North African desert in the Second World War, Turner’s testament from the war in Iraq offers unflinchingly accurate description but no moral judgement, leaving the reader to draw any conclusions. Repetitive media reports show little of people’s daily experience of the war and occupation. In Phantom Noise, as in Here, Bullet, we see and feel the devastatingly surreal reality of everyday life and death for soldiers and civilians through the eyes of an eloquent writer who served in the US Army for seven years, with a year’s tour of duty in Iraq as an infantry team leader.

‘With courage and an uncommon willingness to see the world as it actually is, Brian Turner returns in Phantom Noise with a bullet-borne language in which helicopters hover like spiders over a film of water. His poem Al-A’imma Bridge alone proves his mastery, and joins him to the tradition of Wilfred Owen and David Jones, for he is their descendant, his poetic gifts detonated into a spray of lyric force that will mark what is possible in poetry for years to come, a chiseling of agony onto paper and a poignant cri de coeur to the republic of conscience’ – Carolyn Forché

COVER PAINTING: Ahmed Nussaif: War
COVER ART PROVIDED WITH THE SUPPORT OF IRAQI ART NFP
www.iraqi-art.com

BRIAN TURNER

PHANTOM NOISE

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

VA Hospital Confessional

At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center

Howl Wind

Aubade: Layover in Amsterdam

The Whale

Chinese Ink Brush Painting

Sleeping in Dick Cheney’s Bed

Viking 1

Perimeter Watch

Illumination Rounds

Puget Sound

Al-A’imma Bridge

Helping Her Breathe

Guarding the Bomber

Phantom Noise

Zippo

Homemade Napalm

Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon

Lucky Money

On the Flight to Alamosa, Colorado

Wading Out

White Phosphorus

.22 Caliber

Green Alexandrine

On the Surgeon’s Table

Unearthed by Wind

Madinat Al-Salam

Stopping the American Infantry Patrol Near the Prophet Yunus Mosque in Mosul, Abu Ali Shows Them the Cloth in His Pocket

Tell Me, Beautiful One, from Where Did the Lord Bring You?

Insignia

Mohammed Trains for the Beijing Olympics, 2008