Brian Turner Interview and a Review of PHANTOM NOISE

The recently released Spring/Summer 2010 issue (Volume XI, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review includes Brian Turner as its featured poet, and readers will find there my review of Turner’s new collection of poetry, Phantom Noise, as well as an interview with the author.

This new volume by Brian Turner serves as an appropriate follow-up to his impressive and widely praised debut book of poems, Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005), which received a number of awards—such as the Beatrice Hawley Award, a New York Times “Editor's Choice” selection, a Pen Center USA "Best in the West" award, and the Poets Prize, among others.

As I mention in the review: “One of the ways Brian Turner has responded to his history, as a soldier at the battlefront who returns home, has been to explore in his poems various experiences encountered in a war zone and to examine the enduring emotions evoked by them. Indeed, early in his new collection of poems, Phantom Noise, Turner reminds readers of how frequently soldiers encounter an inability to leave behind the traumatic images and dramatic experiences of war.”

In response to one of my questions in the interview about the poems he produced while in uniform during or after the Iraq War, Turner offers an insightful reply: “When I look back at myself as a soldier writing poetry in Iraq, I see a writer who is beginning to learn how to write as a witness. (As a witness to my own life, as well as those around me.) In previous manuscripts I’d written (on a variety of subjects), I mostly imposed my style, my music, on to the subject at hand. In Iraq, though I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time, I was learning how to listen more to the poem rising from within the moment.”

I invite visitors to read my review, “Walking Among Them: Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise” as well as the interview, and I urge everyone to browse through the entire new Spring/Summer 2010 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.