Phantom Noise
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- ¥1,000
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- ¥1,000
発行者による作品情報
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Turner s debut, Here, Bullet (2006) was likely the most discussed debut of the decade: its sharp, accessible verse reflected Turner s U.S. Army service in wartime Iraq. It s a hard act to follow, but Turner manages well, alternating poems about his uneasy return to civilian life in California with attempts to understand Iraq and Iraqis from the very recent past to the long sweep of Arabic poetry and history. Turner the veteran sees war everywhere plywood At Lowe s Home Improvement Center cracks like mortars; a flight in a small civilian plane reminds him of a troop transport, my view a distorted globe,/ my reflection in it moonless, culpable. Poems on his childhood and on American places emphasize undercurrents of violence, premonitions of military life. But Turner also displays his anguished interest in Arab experience. Ash blackened the sky in 1258, blood/ ran in the rivers of Dajla and Farat. At their best, his poems feel like personal essays, driven by reminiscence or reportage. Yet the epic past cannot obscure the troubled present not in the Mosul airbase where Turner guarded a huddle of blindfolded prisoners, not in Iraqi cities with their distressed children, not even in the Pacific forest where the volume concludes: there is not one thing I might say to the world, Turner says, which the world does not already know.
