Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

April 28, 2014
U.S. Army veteran Powers, who won acclaim for his Iraq war novel The Yellow Birds, returns to those scenes and to his rural South, in this clear and—at best—haunting poetic debut. Powers starts in the desert, “the vast unending waste/ of Texas,” but soon enough we are in the Middle East, where “war is just us/ making little pieces of metal/ pass through each other.” More than about the experience of war, though, these poems of demotic American free verse describe the experience of coming home after a war, and feeling lost: “I can’t remember/ how to be alive,” one page admits, and on the next the poet imagines himself deceased: “seeing/ my shadow on the ground/ I tried to outline in/ in chalk.” Though no innovator, Powers does just enough to the spoken language. Beginning one poem “We are born to be makers of crude tools,” he compares another poem to a tool that kills, the infamous “Improvised Explosive Device”: “If this poem had wires coming out of it,/ you would call the words devices,/ if you found them threatening in any way.” Powers seems confident in his sounds and able to speak to a literate public that knows he has something to say.

April 1, 2014
Powers, author of the shattering war novel The Yellow Birds (2012), turns to poetry while concentrating on familiar themes of dislocation, fear and "unmoored memory." As with that novel, most of the poems in this slender collection occupy three spaces at once: Iraq, the home front and the liminal country between them. The longest and most striking piece likens the poem itself to an IED, "or improvised explosive device"; though it opens on a rather unpromising poetry-slam note ("If this poem had wires / coming out of it, / you would not read it"), Powers builds steadily on the extended metaphor of poem as bomb, the images growing steadily more gruesome ("if these words were your best / friend's legs, / dangling"). As is true of so many of the best poems about war--think Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" or James Wright's "Mad Fight Song for William S. Carpenter"--the tone is understated, the affect sometimes unnervingly flat; having seen what he has of combat, Powers can no longer be moved by ordinary emotions, and the language he uses at home is the language of battle: "I tell her I love her like not killing / or ten minutes of sleep / beneath the low rooftop wall / on which my rifle rests." And just as it is well that, as Robert E. Lee said, war is so horrible lest we come to love it too much, it is good that most books of poems about war, such as this one, are so short, lest we be overwhelmed by the grim news they bring. Powers sometimes wrestles with form, the length of his lines threatening to leave him breathless, but his intent is clear: He has survived, and though he now "know[s] better than to hope," he also knows that he has beaten the odds--and that he is not alone. A welcome debut. We hope that the next sequence finds Powers on safer ground, exploring the possibilities of life away from the front.

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Starred review from April 1, 2014

We have few poetic chroniclers of war and even fewer as eloquent as Powers is in his first collection after the multi-award-winning novel The Yellow Birds. Two of the four sections cover the Iraq war and its aftermath in stark, vivid language, with many of the poems revealing how it felt to be a machine gunner in Mosul and Tel Afar, as Powers was. What the poet conveys best is the draining necessity of making difficult choices continuously during battle: "that for at least one day I don't have to decide/ between dying and shooting a little boy." Sometimes Powers uses understatement to describe the immensity of war, as in the title poem: "that war is just us/ making little pieces of metal/ pass through each other." Even more poignant are poems that describe the difficult days after a buddy returns home: "he wishes/ he had died instead of living/ houseboundbedboundmindboundbodybound/ like a child, watching/ as his mother watched/ the roads, pitted and seeded." Longer poems like "Improvised Explosive Device" and "The Locks of the James" could have used some word winnowing, as the lack of concision dilutes some of the energy. Elsewhere, though, Powers surprises us by moving beyond a military focus and including references to art, literature, and photography. VERDICT Since the World War I poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owens, few poets have captured life in the war zone. Powers does so vividly and eloquently while showing the emotional costs that soldiers suffer during battle and after returning stateside. A poetry book that demands an audience.--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2014
Military veteran Powers' acclaimed Iraq War novel, The Yellow Birds (2012), gripped readers with its close-to-the-bone story line, but his lyricism is equally meritorious. Powers now delivers on that strength in his first poetry collection: For the silence that has filled your ears / again / and particles of light / funneled through the holes / made by metal meeting metal / meeting muscle meeting bone. These revelatory poems capture war's profound dualities as well as chaos: Everyone is where they are / by accident; they will likely be as scared / as you are. James reveals the strange counterpoint between the horrors of war and unexpected beauty: Red, like a wound bled into water, / mixes with my mother's voice. He also considers the stoic words of a now-dead father, and the lasting influence of a modest community in West Virginia. Poem by poem, Powers travels an incredible journey through the thoughts and feelings of a veteran attempting to put the pieces together as he looks both forward and back, hoping someday something will make sense. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)