At Lowe's Home Improvement Center

I liked Brian Turner's Here, Bullet a lot, and this poem on Poetry Daily today makes me think I'm going to like his new Phantom Noise even more. This brings the war home in multiple ways. As Neil says, "I'm living with war in my heart every day."

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

I love the last quatrain of "Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting," by Kevin C. Powers (from the Feb. 2009 issue of Poetry):

I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand,
that war is just us
making little pieces of metal
pass through each other.

A more deadpan version of Brian Turner's address to the bullet that might kill him, "Here, Bullet."

Brian Turner reading

Thanks to Allen Taylor for putting this one on his blog, which I like enough to do the same thing myself:

Headlines; Brian Turner, "Here, Bullet"

The big headline in the International Herald Tribune today:

"Rice to return to Mideast with plan"

I don't know which is worse: the idea that she had no clue what to do on her previous trip(s) to the Mideast, or the idea that she is bringing a plan from Bush along, whose previous plans for the Mideast have not been particularly successful.

It makes me want to stop reading the newspaper. I get the same reaction when I read The New Yorker sometimes: there's yet another article about how badly things are going in Iraq, and all it makes me want to read is Brian Turner's poetry collection Here, Bullet. Turner was a GI in Iraq, and his collection is uncannily powerful. Poetry is indeed "news that stays news," as Ezra Pound said. Three poems from the book are on-line from when they were published in The Georgia Review.