by C.S. Lewis (as Clive Hamilton),
released online by Project Gutenberg in 1999,
Ebook No. 2003, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2003.
Reissued in print by Cosimo Classics, 2005,
88 pages, paper,
ISBN-10: 1596053720
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Phantom Noise,
by Brian Turner,
Alice James Books, 2010,
93 pages, paper, $16.95,
ISBN: 978-1-882295-80-7
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If we ever have a true history of the Iraq Wars, it will have come from the slant of poets in the trenches, not from embedded journalists or other official spokespersons.

I was reminded of this when, looking for information on C.S. Lewis’ later fantasy writing, I came upon his 1919 first book of poems, Spirits In Bondage, in the public domain on Project Gutenberg.  As a 19 year-old, Lewis was thrown into one of the most horrific battles of WWI, experienced trench warfare in one of the worst tank battles of the Somme, was wounded, saw his best friend killed, and finally returned home to care for his friend’s family.  Fortunately, Lewis had one resource that most of his fellow soldiers in 1916 did not have: He could write about the horrors of battle.

In the first poem, Lewis personifies the atrocities of war he has experienced through the personage of Milton’s ruined archangel Satan:

I am Nature, the Mighty Mother,

I am the law: ye have none other.

I am the flower and the dewdrop fresh,

I am the lust in your itching flesh.

I am the battle’s filth and strain,

I am the widow’s empty pain.

I am the sea to smother your breath,

I am the bomb, the falling death. . . .

The poems that follow record young Lewis wrestling with the fallen archangel for nothing less than his soul, and those of his fellow soldiers.  I very much recommend this text, a free download from www.projectgutenberg.com.  Those interested in following Lewis’ mythological trail might read these poems as a roman à clef of his early career.

The casualties in the Somme were horrific.  According to John Keegan’s A History of Warfare, the British Army lost 20,000 men on first day of the Somme, July 1, 1916.  Lewis was a part of a battle in which machine guns fired six hundred times per minute and killed a thousand-man British regiment in an few minutes. Lewis’ poems directly absorbed the shock of his experiences of trench warfare, atrocities, post-traumatic shock, and reentry into society.

In the most recent wars, I find the American poet Brian Turner confronting war no less earnestly than Lewis did.  Over half of Turner’s poems were written in Iraq, at a time when American casualties were flown home under covert conditions.  Turner could not keep the battle events at as much of a literary distance as Lewis could; he works in a very different way than Lewis, the mythologist who clothed his experiences in fantasy and myth.  In contrast, Turner is a realist, in the sense of Stephen Crane, constantly peeling away layers of experience until he gets to what is real.

His first book, Here, Bullet (Alice James, 2005) was a shot heard round the world.  There is nothing between this poet and the bullet, directly addressed to him.  Some considered it the first shot in the peace poetry movement.  I did not.  Poetry cannot stop wars; it can only get us closer to the truth of them.  For a long time after encountering these poems, I read no newspaper and listened to no nightly news.  This news from Brian Turner in the trenches was not only the truest news I had of the Iraq War; it was the only news.  And it holds up well after three years, preserving the landscape of this unfortunate war with bone – chilling accuracy through the voice of a soldier’s deepest reflections.

Brian Turner’s second book, Phantom Noise (Alice James, 2010), is an even more confident collection.  Here, the personal wrestling with war and belief is much more in the foreground than Lewis’ struggle was.  The book begins with a series of traumatic flashbacks in the longest poem of the collection, called “At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center.”  These flashbacks were well known in my own family because my father suffered shell shocks, as they were then called, after World War II.  I recalled witnessing them when I encountered Turner’s description of a flashback in progress:

Standing in aisle 16, the hammer and nail aisle,

I bust a 50 pound box of double -headed nails. . . .

In a steady stream

they pour onto the tile floor, constant as shells. . . .

Turner’s poems shine light on key issues that will not go away. “Insignia,” a poem for women sexually molested by their own superior officers, is both sad and horrifying.  The epigraph takes dead aim at the reader and refuses to let us wander from the statistic that “[o]ne in three female officers will experience / sexual assault while serving in the military.”  Without letting the reader turn away, the story begins its own unfolding:

She hides under a deuce n’half this time — sleeping

on a roll of foam, draped in mosquito netting.

It goes on to address her terrorizer:

It’s you she’s dreaming of, Sergeant — she’ll dream of you

for years to come.  If she makes it out of this country alive,

which she probably will.  You will be the fire and the

hovering

breath.  Not the sniper.  Not the bomber in the streets.

As often happens in Turner’s poems, the one about to assault and the one about to be assaulted respond within the hair-trigger constraints of combat.  Lewis, too, has poems that suggest the molestation of civilians by his fellow soldiers.  Like Lewis, Turner takes the side of individual human spirits held in bondage by war.

Both poets return to society and more hopeful settings “barred against despair.”  For Lewis, the poem “Oxford” describes the psychological space of their homecoming:

We are not wholly brute.  To us remains

A clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams,

A place of visions and of loosening chains,

A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams.

She was not builded out of common stone

But out of all men’s yearning and all prayer

That she might live, eternally our own,

The Spirit’s stronghold-barred against despair.

Turner ends up finding that psychological space in Olympic National Park:

. . . I put nothing in The Jar of Quiet Thoughts nearby.

Because there is not one thing I might say to the world

which the world does not already know.

Yet both these poets, who have been in harm’s way, have much to say to us.

— Mark Schorr

by Chad Sweeney,
Alice James Books, 2010,
88 pages, paper, $15.95,
ISBN: 978-1-882295-82-1
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If you’ve ever had the good fortune to attend a Chad Sweeney reading, then you already know that these events are rapid-fire rehearsals of the word.  It’s a different experience, however, when these poems are found on the page, and we are lucky to have a new collection from Sweeney.  Parable of Hide and Seek could be described as an inheritor to some of his earlier work in that it builds large, imagistic worlds out of a very keen sense of perception and metaphor.  In Parable of Hide and Seek, Sweeney has pared down the language until each poem becomes something of a koan, or a short Gnostic parable.

What I have always admired and appreciated about Sweeney’s poems is their great sense of empathy and emotional maturity.  They are never sentimental, but it is clear from the first word to the last that this is someone who pays close attention to the world, to the names and sounds of things, as any good poet should.  An example from “The Piano Teacher”:

A music box wound too tightly will explode,

playing its song all at once.

The practice is to unwind the song slowly.

Think of this when you touch the key of C.

In “The Sentence,” Sweeney is at his absurd and imagistic best, insisting:

The bones of Marcel Duchamp

laid end to end

reach all the way

to the bottom of this hill

where a little slab of concrete bridges one

obscurity to another

We go on to discover that the speaker places Duchamp’s jaw in just such a way that “the oblique syntax of bones / repeats its inquiry / in the language of the world.”

This could very easily be written off as an odd ars poetica, but there is more wishing to be expressed underneath this poem.  The specificity of naming Marcel Duchamp, for example — the notion that the artist’s bones can be found and re-purposed — gives the sense that all modes of expression are languages that bring us into relationships, and that each strange relationship is a way of speaking to one another on a level of deep engagement.

If absurdity marks the beginning of meaning in these poems, Sweeney’s objective is far from simply causing bewilderment.  As he says in the title poem:

I hid as a bullet fired into hay.

I hid as a system of government.

You were my partner in everything.

I lived for you to find me.

This is the genius of Chad Sweeney’s poetry.  These poems only mystify so far as to draw you into them, so that the poems become a communion between speaker and reader.

I have personally walked away from a session of reading these poems (and I can’t help coming back to them over and over again) feeling as if I have just witnessed some marvelously catastrophic event.  There is terror and pathos in these poems, bullets and governments, but there is also partnership, friendship, and love.  In other words, for every complication presented, Sweeney may not give an answer, but hints thoughtfully at a new direction.

— Thom Dawkins

by Abayomi Animashaun,
Black Lawrence Press, 2010,
82 pages, paper, $14.00,
ISBN: 978-0-9826364-3-5
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The Giving of Pears is an utterly refreshing book of poetry.  These delicate and often fanciful pieces are populated by a mélange of ghosts, unborn children, snippets of village life and culture (the author is a Nigerian émigré), and magical tunings.  Some of them resemble mystical puzzle boxes, crosses between koans and philosophical conundrums, hearkening back to author Abayomi Animashaun’s study of mathematics.  They are clever, sad, amusing and straightforward, without succumbing to pretentiousness.  They contain a haunted music and a vigorous imagination, as exemplified here:

I have no words in the machinery of my soul

For how you’ve just pulled me to you.

Released my belt and, now, steadying me

Across the blue flood into the new country.

Divided into six compelling sections, the poems form a colorful travelogue of the psyche, their overriding themes of loss, continuity and hope underscored by an often plain but poignant syntax.  In the first section, “Going to School,” Animashaun explores doorways into other worlds, a technique that might quickly become trite; in his hands they have a fresh deftness, as demonstrated in this excerpt from “Tomato”:

Push slowly and enter

A village with its own silent physics.

Its own reddened curvature:

Yellow is the face of the newborn.

Green, the tired hat of the old.

Here sand is red,

And goats lead their shepherd

Through a narrow yard’s edge.

The “Lagos” section acts as hymn, requiem and memoir.  The poem “Sunday Mornings at the Barber Shop,” in this section, explores myth, death, superstition and loss through potent imagery entwined with matter-of-fact depictions.  This seamless way of braiding the extraordinary with the ordinary is one of Animashaun’s personal hallmarks.  Rather than resulting in forced or overly weighted lines, he manages to dance solemnly yet lightly along the edge:

On Sunday mornings

When services begin,

The angels hang their wings,

Abandon their temples,

And come down for a haircut

And nice shave.

“The Unseen” is devoted to ghosts, the unborn, lost loves, and how these beings, whether real or imagined, speak to us, the poetry they engender and the mysterious ways they continue to come and go.  “The Other Testament” is an unsettling set of humanistic reinterpretations of religion and figures such as Noah and Mohammed.  Animashaun creates an immediacy in these reimagined tales through the use of disjointed phrases, forming a shuffled sense of time in which the present and the ancient become merged.  The elegiac musings of “The Tailor and His Strings” form the final section.  In “If, In My Next Life,” Animashaun conjures an abstract vision of immortality:

If, in my  next life, I have a say

In the molding of clay around

My soul, I’d let my heart be sown

With the sun’s light and traces

From the blue in Cezanne.

Then, geese would find home

In my hands.  Birds seeking

Shelter from storms would

Be unafraid to gather and arrange

Twigs on my skull. . . .

The book ends appropriately with an evocation of Rilke, whose imagistic explorations of spirit and time — along with C.P. Cavafy and Kahlil Gibran, and the paintings of Cezanne — guide the poet’s aesthetic journey.

These poems bring to mind Federico Garcia Lorca’s aesthetic of Duende, which often refers to a spirit of evocation, a soulful poetics, an emotional response to music.  Christopher Maurer, editor of In Search of Duende, a collection of poems and essays by Lorca, identifies “irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical” as elements crucial to Lorca’s vision of Duende.  Such terms also serve to describe Animashaun’s mesmerizing voice.

— Annie Seikonia