Here, Bullet: Poems by Brian Turner, Alice James Books, $14.95

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On the front cover of Here, Bullet we see a long figure, an armed soldier in camouflage, looking as if the desert might swallow him at any moment. Indeed, the blobs of earth colors that dot his uniform appear as if they're threatening to decompose into desert terrain. Only the words "Here, Bullet," dark against a pale sky, possess a solidity the landscape, as well as that figure temporarily upright on the desert floor, lack.

Reading Brian Turner's often lush poems of Iraq and the war there that grinds on without any end in sight, I find myself often returning to the cover. How could poems about war, written by a veteran, feel like an Arabian Baedeker? How could the voice so often appear calm, and deadly actions so often move in slow-motion? How could a poem about a fellow soldier's suicide contain beauty? Could the cover photo be telling us that the very landscape mocks our best intentions? That the author is going to serve not as a macho grunt confessing his dirty war secrets, but more as a guide to a strange land?

That strange land comes to the fore in the poem about the soldier who takes his own life. "Eulogy" begins, "It happens on a Monday, at 11:20 A.M.," so we're on guard, forewarned that something ominous is about to take place. And yet "seagulls drift by on the Tigris River." Guards munch on their sandwiches, and, shockingly, "a mongoose pauses under the orange trees." Shocking because there's such beauty in the landscape, even at the exact moment a soldier, Private Miller, takes his life nearby. Even before we realize that this soldier's fired a bullet into his mouth, we're observing and absorbing the sound: "The sound reverberates down the concertina coils/the way piano wire thrumbs when given slack." We're somehow culpable as readers, as we digest this scene. The author tricks us, in comparing the bullet's hum to that of a piano wire, but this sense of involvement goes beyond trickery. It's as if Turner is saying: I have to plant you here in the scene, even though your thousands of miles away. It's the only way you can begin to understand some of this.

That "low hush" that Private Miller finds at the end of the poem-the only motive for Miller's suicide the poem gives us-permeates this book. In that way, it's quite different from most of the poems of the Vietnam War. Obscenities, Vietnam veteran Michael Casey's fine book of poems on the Vietnam War, which won the Yale Younger Prize in 1972, for example, feels loud compared with Here, Bullet. Casey wants a more immediate, visceral response to the "obscenities" he witnessed. Here's an excerpt from "On Death," describing a street scene in South Vietnam:

          A woman
          Sits on the pavement
          Beside
          Wails
          And pounds her fists
          On pavement
          Flies all over
          It     like made of wax
          No jaw
          Intestines poured
          Out of stomach
          The penis in the air

No Vietnam Baedeker here. Casey wants us to feel revulsion at the brutal way war breaks and defiles the body. It doesn't matter whose body, or how the victim died. And it doesn't matter if the surrounding landscape is beautiful or not. The poem closes with a soldier's prayer: "I don't want in death to be a / public obscenity like this."

Yet it's not as if Turner can't capture the loud moments of war. In "9-Line Medevac," he gives us, in nine frightening sections, the frustration and panic a soldier feels in radioing for a medevac helicopter to immediately rescue two wounded soldiers. He guides us through the maddening protocol of nine questions that must be answered before help can arrive. This is a very different voice than that of "Eulogy, and most of the poems in this book. In this poem we hear ". . . each voice edged with that urgent pulse of the larynx, the vocal cords roughened by the lungs . . . ." There is no peace possible in this scene for all involved, especially the wounded: ". . . Sgt. Randolph has four children and can't die here, his wife wouldn't allow it if she knew, and if she knew the shock of it snapped back his head and threw him down into the vehicle troop compartment, if she knew that she'd fall to her knees . . . ." The use of comma splices keep plunging us further into the jagged chaos of the scene. Turner certainly could have written a book of "obscenities," in the adrenaline voice of Michael Casey, had he chosen.

Instead, we have quotations from Arab poets: "This is war, then: All is well." We have quotations from the Qur'an: "Who brings forth the living from the dead, and the dead from the living?" And we have notes at the back of the book that reveal this soldier/ poet spent time studying Iraqi culture from a variety of sources. He's even captivated by Arabic words, like "jameel," which he translates in the notes as "beautiful." This is a book that calls for contemplation. It wants to go beyond the quick sound bites, the ten second news updates on the war in Iraq, the simplistic responses from those on the home front who bother to follow the war.

If there's one poem that you wish you could instant message to every American cell phone, it would be "2000 lbs.," an account of the aftermath of a 2000 lb. bomb going off in Ashur Square, Mosul. The poem, in eight sections, lets you see some of those affected by the blast, from the bomber, to a taxi car driver, to a US soldier, to Iraqis old and young:

          Nearby, an old woman cradles her grandson,
          Whispering, rocking him on her knees
          As though singing him to sleep, her hands
          Wet with their blood, her black dress
          Soaked in it as her legs give out
          And she buckles with him to the ground.

Here we have an American soldier giving us the real news of the war, how it destroys the lives of not just our troops, but also of innocent Iraqis. The news we can't seem to ever get from our oh-so-diverse news sources.

Reading Here, Bullet, I feel the same shock of recognition--a veil pulled from an often described but never seen sculpture--as I did in reading Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, back in 1972. I find that both heartening and depressing at the same time.