I came to know Brian Turner in the Sundarbans on a boat named after a flower. Two days before, I had already witnessed his soldierly alacrity when, in the middle of a midmorning poetry event, he leapt from his chair to cut short the fall of a standee rendered wobbly by the wind in the otherwise quiet garden of Jorasanko Thakur Bari, Kolkata. It was the leap of a leopard – poised, fluid, exact. Here was a poet whose body still remembered that it was once a sergeant in the US Army, yet the poems he recited made clear that his mind was at one with those of the mystics. Before his reading, he talked about how news converts death into mere numbers, and stressed that we should never let numbers desensitize us to the horrors that loss of life entails, because

The shocking blood of the men 
forms an obscene art: a moustache, alone 
on a sidewalk, a blistered hand’s gold ring 
still shining, while a medic, Doc Lopez, 
pauses to catch his breath, to blow it out 
hard, so he might cup the left side of a girl’s face 
in one hand, gently, before bandaging 
the half gone missing.

— “16 Iraqi Policeman”

The year was 2019, and the month November. The name of the boat was Shiuli, the night-blooming jasmine of heartbreaking beauty growing on a shrub known as the “tree of sorrow.” As the diesel-powered boat went deeper into the waterways of the mangrove forests, our freewheeling conversation became more and more intense. By then, I had read Here, Bullet, from which the above lines have been extracted. The choice of details packed into these eight lines might, at first glance, appear shocking (although Turner himself uses the adjective), but the actual intention is to drill into the rockface of imagination so that the world, even if viewed from only a bluff shelter, reveals itself without filters. Here, Turner favours graphicacy over metaphor.

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In a conversation, he prefers listening to speaking. That is an unusual trait for someone with his background and experience. He served in the US Army for seven years and was an infantry team leader for a year (2003-04) in the Iraq War. His fellow military men did not know about his literary pursuits. He already had an MFA in poetry before he joined the army. Although Here, Bullet (2005) was his debut collection to be published, he had written no less than seven manuscripts of poems, purely for the sake of making beauty and sense of the world. His first book deservedly won nine major literary awards, including the Beatrice Hawley Award (2005), the Lannan Literary Fellowship (2006), the NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry (2007) and the Poets’ Prize (2007).

Taut, terse and tenebrous, Here, Bullet is a hand grenade of a book. It makes us dream – intact – inside its blast radius as a multitude explodes within. There is a stark immediacy to the poems, which slowly transcend their sepulchral connotations. They easily make room in memory, not letting us rest:

The skeletons rest in their boxes
still slack-jawed twenty years later,
as if amazed at their own deaths.

— “Repatriation Day”

The god of lucidity is in the details. Turner’s gaze is unfazed. He writes like a dream scribe. The after-effect of his lines is much stronger than their immediate effect, and this quality is natural rather than calibrated, which is what makes his poems relatable. In the above extract, the first line simply shares an observation, but we don’t see the second line coming the way it does. It shows us a fresh way of looking at skeletons (“slack-jawed”). But it’s the third line that flies off the page, for it instantly brings to mind the humans behind the skeletons.

His similes, although used sparingly, carry a distinct shimmer:

April. And the air dry
as the shoulders of a water buffalo.

— “How Bright It Is”

The book is divided into four parts, the epigraphs to each of which reveal Turner’s immersion in Arabic literature in translation, including the Qur’an. There are two striking prose poems as well. The first is a love poem (“In the dream our orgasm destroys a nation”; “Last Night’s Dream”) and the second, titled “9-Line Medevac,” is structured as a poetic response to the nine questions of the standard medical evacuation request form.

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When he probes the past, he goes far enough to discover startling oases in a landscape that compels him to accept aridity:

In the month of Ab, late summer 
of the seventh century BCE, a poet 
chisels text into stone tablets, etching 
three thousand lines and brushing them by hand, 
the dust blown off with a whispered breath.

— “Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief”

A Guggenheim Fellow, Turner, in his own words, thinks of the poems in Phantom Noise (2010) “as bookends to a conversation.” In the first book, we see a soldier engaged in combat. In the second, we encounter the wartime experiences the soldier brings home. The decision to include the two books in a single edition – aptly titled Gunmetal Blues – stems from the fact that both are in deep conversation with each other. Speaking about the intriguing title of the second book, which he didn’t know he would write, Turner says,

It came to me while doing a residency in Marfa, Texas, with the Lannan Foundation. Late at night, 3, maybe 4 am, a large owl would perch in the branches of a tree outside the place I was staying in. It would call out something with its otherworldly, mystic voice, one that I could feel in my body, and I think something about that owl connects to my finding the title Phantom Noise. Of course, it’s also a reference or corollary to phantom limbs.

In the second book, the lines become longer, and the stanzas denser. The titular poem is the only one in the book that shuns punctuation, to stunning effect:

There is this ringing hum   this
bullet-borne language   ringing
shell-fall and static   this late-night
ringing of threadwork and carpet ringing

— “Phantom Noise”

Continuing in this vein, the poem becomes a vigorous incantation. Death remains an abiding theme in both the books:

When the boy brings us a platter of fruit,
I mistake cantaloupe for a human skull.  

— “VA Hospital Confessional”

But the grandeur and tenderness of life are beautifully reaffirmed in lines such as the following:

If I could travel a thousand years back
to August 1004, to a small tent
where Alhazen has fallen asleep among books
about sunsets, shadows, and light itself,
I wouldn’t ask whether light travels in a straight line,
or what governs the laws of refraction, or how
he discovered the bridgework of analytical geometry;
I would ask about the light within us,
what shines in the mind’s great repository
of dream, and whether he’s studied the deep shadows
daylight brings, how light defines us.

— “Alhazen of Basra”

The order of poems in a book is as important as the poems themselves. So, if Turner places “Puget Sound” before “Al-A’imma Bridge,” his reasons to do so are solid. The former is about a private strangulating his wife (“white-knuckles / the cord, the ends wrapped tight / around each hand”) and dumping her body in the estuarine waters of Puget Sound. The latter, running over five pages, is a haunting requiem for the 2005 Al-A’imma Bridge disaster, in which 965 pilgrims died and more than 400 were injured because of the panic caused by a rumour that a suicide bomber was prowling on the bridge. Most of the victims were crushed in the ensuing stampede, while others fell into the Tigris river and drowned. Taking the tragedy as a premise, Turner traces a masterly arc through the history of Iraq, going as far back as the mid-13th century:

the dead from the year 1258 read from ancient scrolls 
cast into the river from the House of Wisdom, 
the eulogies of nations given water’s swift erasure

— “Al-A’imma Bridge”

The spectrum of experiences that Gunmetal Blues makes possible is astounding. A book of poems that bring us closer to humanity must be celebrated like the tender morning we welcomed that November on the deck of the Shiuli, the mangroves around us silent, as if in prayer.

Excerpted with permission from Gunmetal Blues, Brian Turner, Sarabjeet Garcha, Copper Coin Press.