Observation Post #71

Observation Post #71

It’s over a hundred degrees, even at dusk.
I scan each story with binoculars
and a smile, hoping to glimpse the girls
drawing open the curtains,
their silhouettes edged in light.

And, in its entirety:
Owls rest in the vines of wild grapes.
Eucalyptus trees shimmer.
And from the minaret, a voice.

Each life has its moment. The sunflowers
lift their faces toward the dawn
as milk cows bellow in fields of trash.

I have watched him in the shadows.
I have watched him in the circle of light
my rifle brings to me. His song
hums in the wings of sand flies.
My mind has become very clear.


Brian Turner


Aaron Baker of CPR wrote:

"Observation Post #71" displays Turner’s abilities at their most concentrated and is one of the finest poems in the collection. Sandwiched between sparsely described physical details, the line “Each life has its moment,” sets up the alchemic moment of the inward turn when the rifle in the speaker’s hands becomes the instrument and bringer of vision. The unspecified “he” (the voice from the minaret?) raises a song that merges in the speaker’s imagination with the song of insects as he reaches his moment of crisis and clarity: “My mind has become very clear.”

Hemingway, who Turner evokes in an epigraph to the book’s first poem, wrote: “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates,” and an attractive quality of Turner’s book is the way he situates his experiences against the geography, language, and history—including the poetic history—of Iraq. According to an interview, he carried with him to Iraq a volume of Arabic poetry, and many of the poems of the book show him attempting to fit his own experiences (while acknowledging the difficulties of doing so) into the context of his historical and cultural surroundings.

Turner's book stands on its head Wordsworth's concept of poetry as powerful emotion recollected in tranquility. With the exception of two poems, Here, Bullet was written entirely in Iraq, often by red lens flashlight after dark to avoid disturbing the soldiers sleeping around him. Regarded this way, the book comes off as a kind of performance art; whatever is rushed and unsatisfying about these poems is part of what the book documents—the voice and testament of someone in the middle of the action.