William Butler Yeats had strong opinions about the poets of the First World War: Rupert Brooke, he said, was “the handsomest young man in England”; Wilfred Owen’s stuff was “all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick.” It is interesting to imagine how he would have sized up Brian Turner, a thirty-eight-year-old former Army sergeant from Fresno, California, and the author of a book of poems about a year he spent deployed in Iraq. Turner describes himself as five feet nine and a hundred and eighty pounds, with short but unbuzzed hair and a growing-out goatee: “Not the best-looking mug in the world, but I do what I can with it.” His début collection, “Here, Bullet,” is more sandy than muddy, has plenty of blood (as well as “Grease guns, pistols, RPGs” and “all the fucks and goddamns / and Jesus Christs of the wounded”), and offers its share of sweetness, in the form of date palms, chai tea, and off-hours prostitutes observed through the lenses of high-powered binoculars. In a poem called “R&R,” he conjures a faraway place “where the beer is so cold it sweats in your hand, / cool as her kissing you with crushed ice, / her tongue wet with blackberry and melon.”
“Here, Bullet” won this year’s Beatrice Hawley Award from a coöperative poetry press in Maine called Alice James Books (previous winners have included manuscripts with titles like “Self and Simulacra,” “Camera Lyrica,” and “Utopic”), and came out last week. On the acknowledgments page, Turner thanks Fi, Jax, Bosch, Liu, Noodles, Zoo, Bodiggidy, Shaft, and Nurse Betty. Nurse Betty is a male medic, and Bodiggidy is Specialist Bogans—“a really good guy.”
Turner—also known as Sergeant T. or “the professor”—was a team leader in the first Stryker brigade to be sent into the combat zone, and was stationed, for much of 2004, near Mosul. He wrote his poems secretly. People in the Army knew that he had a master’s degree, but no one ever asked him what it was for—it was an M.F.A. in poetry, from the University of Oregon—and he saw no reason to advertise it. Noncommissioned officers, he says, are the “backbone of the Army,” and “it’s hard to be hard-nosed if you’re writing poetry.” He didn’t want his underlings to think he was writing about “flowers and stuff like that.”
Turner’s first manuscript, which he completed in graduate school, was a protest of the War on Drugs. His second, “In the Bullet Factory,” also unpublished, was about his experiences with the 10th Mountain Division in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1999 and 2000. As a war poet, he sidesteps the classic distinction between romance and irony, opting instead for the surreal. In “Dreams from the Malaria Pills (Bosch),” he describes his friend Tom Bosch’s nightmares—“absolute doozies,” Bosch says—of setting himself on fire and of shaving his face off “like a rind of fruit . . . sloughing the blood and skin in sinkwater.” When they got back to the States, and Turner told Bosch that he had written a poem about his dreams, Bosch remembers saying, “Oh, jeez, what are you writing, a book of horrors here or what?”
The only book of poems that Turner brought with him to Iraq was called “Iraqi Poetry Today.” He already knew and loved the epic of Gilgamesh—the story of the warrior-king of Uruk, who terrorizes his people, battles monsters, and seeks immortality. It was thrilling, he said, “to know that Gilgamesh was the land where I was at.” Tablets on which the legend was recorded in cuneiform, by a Babylonian scribe named Sin-leqi-unninni, were found in the ancient city of Nineveh, near Mosul. “We were out in the ruins of Nineveh, it was January or early February, and it was snowing six inches to a foot deep,” Turner said. “I don’t know if any of the other soldiers knew about the history of Gilgamesh and the tablets and where we really were. To me it was amazing, a beautiful place. But at the same time to know that we were walking in formation and we were doing our job—the dichotomy was odd.
“It’s sort of like San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It’s big like that, but there are no trees, just this barren, hilly place, and we were just going down in the hollows between the hilltops and then we found a little place where we could overwatch. We just sat there in the snow and watched for mortar rounds being launched in the city.” Later, when Turner wrote a poem about the tablets, he dedicated it to Sin-leqi-unninni.
