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Phantom Noise (2010)

by Brian Turner(Favorite Author)

4.05 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1882295803 (ISBN13: 9781882295807)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Alice James Books

review 1: Phantom Noise, had a lot to live up to. It did not disappoint. In this book, Turner succeeds in haunting his readers with the echoes and phantoms that plague a soldier who is home from war. It begins with VA HOSPITAL CONVESSIONAL, with the words “Each night is different. Each night is the same.” Wherein a soldier is traveling the long road back and forth in his dreams, confessing the troubling images he can’t erase from his thoughts.“I whisper into their ears saying,Howlwin? Howlwin? Meaning, Mortars? Mortars?Howl wind, motherfucker? Howl wind?The milk cow stares with its huge brown eyesThe milk cow wants to know how I can do this to another human being.”Turner takes us along for a veteran’s experience shopping in: AT LOWE’S HOME IMPROVEMENT CENTER where nail... mores look like firing pins from M-16s, the swooping sound of plywood falling to the ground sound like mortars “the moment they crack open” and cash registers sliding shut sound like machine guns being charged. Ordinary sounds and shapes shift into ominous reminders of this far away war that can instantaneously reappear back at home.That bridge from here to there is nowhere more haunting than a coupling of poems that appear side-by-side PUGET SOUND and AL-A’IMMA BRIDGE. The first is a poem about a soldier who strangles his wife and throws her body in the Puget Sound. Her body is found days later with eyes “grayed-out by what she’s seen.” The second is an epic about the kind of tragedy we can’t possibly imagine: Iraqi pilgrims who were trampled and drowned from the mere rumor of an eminent suicide bombing. Not a single shot fired, no explosion, but a panic–the kind that comes from living with a constant threat. From knowing the sound of breaking glass and the concussion of explosives ripping through bodies and metal and concrete. This kind of just-beneath-the-surface fear caused a crush over the Al-A’Imma Bridge, a railing gave way and 965 pilgrims were trampled and drowned to death, falling into the Tigris river. In the epic, Turner tells the history of Iraq with the falling of those bodies. The German Luftwaffe from 1941, back further and deeper to Alexander the Great and the Babylonians and Sumerians and Assyrians. He recalls the year 1258 when Baghdad was sacked and all her inhabitants massacred and thrown into the Tigris. The great House of Wisdom, one of the greatest collections of information of the ancient world was burned, scrolls thrown into the river. The falling bodies awake the djinn, spirit beings created out of fire. They sense and feed on emotions, and they want to claw and grab at the ankles of the falling bodies. “The Tigris is filling with the dead, filling/with bricks from Abu Ghraib, burning vehicles/ pushed from Highway 1, with rebar, stone, metal,/ with rubble from the mosque bombed in Samarra.” All the way back to Gilgamesh who knows that “each life is the world dying anew.” It is an epic that dares you to find out, to rediscover this history and its meaning, to learn about the people we’ve been at war with all these years.This book slayed me. It was full of the same power and intensity as the first, but if it is possible, I think this one struck even more into the core of my emotions. Turner masterfully got into my head, with a tinnitus of rhythm in the title poem, PHANTOM NOISE.“…This threading of bullets in muscle and bone this ringinghum this ringing hum thisringing.”You can’t read that poem and not hear those metallic words plinking around upstairs.In INSIGNIA, with complete sensitivity, Turner focuses in on the subject of sexual assault on female soldiers. In the poem, a woman is hiding under a truck from a Sergeant who has every intention of raping her. The voice in the poem seems to talk the Sgt. down, talks him out of it just for tonight. This poem is so delicately done, it almost feels like a bedtime story. But one that packs Turner’s signature punch.“It’s you she’s dreaming of, Sergeant–she’ll dream of youfor years to come. If she makes it out of this country alive,which she probably will. You will be the fire and the hoveringbreath. Not the sniper. Not the bomber in the streets. You.So I’m here to ask this one night’s reprieve.Let her sleep tonight. Let her sleep…”There are not many books that I will say this about, but honestly this is one that is worth picking up a copy of. Mine is marked up and worn and noted on and I love these poems again every time I read them.
review 2: War IS the thing that gives Turner meaning. He also sees that gives us meaning, too. I loved "At Lowe's Home Improvement Center" where visions of the battle left behind haunt the speaker and "Dead soldiers are laid out at the registers,/on the black conveyor belts,/and people in line still/reach for their wallets..." Turner can also write about the world at peace with the same compaction and precision he uses in his war poems. less

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