Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers

[Caroline]

I finally got around to reading and reviewing this book which was on the shortlist for the 2014 TS Eliot Prize.

I bought 'Letter composed during a lull in the fighting' in the spring of 2014 and for various reasons during the year, mostly to do with a lack of time was not able to do more than dip into it, selecting the occasional poem. I realised that was a hopeless approach and no way to treat someone's first collection. I I had to give the poems the time they deserved, to begin with the first poem and to carry on until I reached the end. Once I did this the poems came to life as a body of work.

I'd come to the poems straight from reading about and researching the first World War so Mr Powers was following in the footsteps of Owen, Sassoon, Blunden and David Jones. It is a testimony to the strength of his writing that once I'd begun I kept on reading his poems. His was a very different kind of war to their’s and this is a survivor's story about what it feels like to come back and how impossible it is to return home.

...You came home
with nothing, and you still
Have most of it left
from After Leaving McGuire Veterans Hospital for the Last Time

These are deeply felt personal poems as Powers tries to make sense of the experience of being out there in Iraq. Poems can be more effective than news items or journalist’s reports in getting across emotions including the bewilderment of the returning soldier

...I’ve wasted all those hours upon
hoping someday something will make sense
from Grace Note

Think almost reaching grief, but
not quite getting there
from Field Manual

I’ve read other reviews here and here
which suggest that Powers could have taken more of a moral stance about the America being at war in Iraq but as I see it what he wants to do in these poems is to tell it like it was for him and the other soldiers.

... … the way an ex-girlfriend of mine
once talked about the idea of a gun. But guns are not ideas
They are not things to which comparisons are made. They are…

The poets of the first World War wanted the civilians to understand their experience but many of them also wrote with the purpose of making the war stop. Powers isn’t necessarily making that sort of case but allowing his experience to speak for itself. He certainly wants to be understood and here he is writing about some ‘Young Republicans’ at a bar.

...…I want to rub their clean
bodies in blood. I want my rifle
and I want them to know
how scared I am still, alone
in bars these three years later when
I notice it is gone.


….. I screamed and
wept and begged for someone
to give it back. “How will I return
fire?” I cried. I truly cried,

from Separation

So we are in David Jones’ territory in Mametz wood, towards the end of In Parenthesis when he is wounded and has no choice but to leave his rifle. It takes three pages of that poem before he finally brings himself to do so –
‘leave it-under the oak.
Leave it for a Cook’s tourist to the Devastated Areas and crawl
as far as you can and wait for the bearers’

So in its essential details Kevin Powers’s war was not so different from theirs after all.

Title poem

[Jen]

Fascinating review, Caroline. Love the comparison at the end. I hope you someday write a book about your reading of war poetry.

[Jenna]

Wow, these seem like powerful poems of witness. Thanks for the review, Caroline.

[Sarah]

Great review Caroline. Sometimes taking a moral stance weighs a poem down, and I like the idea of his writing this for the sake of clearly conveying the experience. Love the title, and your excerpts. thanks -

[Caroline]

The other thing I wanted to say about some of the poems in this collection is how he seems to have fully realised how tough it must have been for his mother and as a mother of sons myself those ones really resonated. And PTSD which I'm currently reading about is threaded through these poems like strands of DNA.

Thanks for all your comments on my review.