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Saturday, December 02, 2006 |
In the comments section of my Happy Feet post, Lee Herrick mentioned the name Donald Munro, the film critic for the Fresno Bee. So I sought out the Fresno Bee newspaper today and found an article on a Fresno area poet, Brian Turner, who is also an Iraq war veteran.
The article was highlighting the recent news that Turner was one of few winners of the national Lannon Fellowship Award for his work "Here, Bullet," which was written while he was serving in Iraq in 2003 - 2004. In the article, Turner said:
"I wrote the bulk of the book — all but three poems — while I was in Iraq. Unlike what people see in the movies, my time there was a year of boredom punctuated by moments that were very intense. Poetry was the perfect vehicle to capture those moments in art form."
(You can read the Fresno Bee article here.)
"Here, Bullet" has also garnered the Beatrice Hawley Award (2005), the Northern California Award for Poetry (2006), the Maine Literary Award for Poetry (2006, and the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Poetry (2006).
As a sampling of his poetic style and voice, consider his poem "Ashbah," which was one of three poems that appeared in an NPR interview in January 2006:
Ashbah
The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,
unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice
sounds from the minaret, a soulfull call
reminding them how alone they are,
how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,
leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.
Turner’s poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, ZYZZYVA, Atlanta Review, and many others. Some of the poems in "Here, Bullet" appear in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. Turner is an English composition instructor at Fresno City College.
For additional reviews regarding "Here, Bullet" and Brian Turner:
The New Yorker, PBS Online NewsHour, New York Foundation of the Arts, Fresno Famous , Abigail Licad.
Candidates for Lannan Literary Awards and Fellowships are nominated by a network of writers, literary scholars, publishers and editors. Since 1989, the foundation has awarded more than $11 million to 161 writers and poets.
Just another book I need to get my hands on.
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