Phantom Noise

January 25, 2010
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.”