On the Use of Diffusion in War Poetry: A Reading of David Harsent’s Legion and Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet

by Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz

On the Use of Diffusion in War Poetry: A Reading of David Harsent’s Legion (Faber and Faber, 2005) and Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005)

Writing war poetry means making predictable choices. One may choose, for example, to depict violence graphically or abstractly. Jeremy Bentham, who was not a poet, believed that vivid detailing of wounded bodies and grotesque deaths would shock readers out of complacency and into pacifism. He was wrong. For long before Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen wrote of trench rats and gas-choked, gargling lungs; before Robert Southey and Lord Byron mocked hack-gazeteering descriptions of Horror; even before Lucan lamented the lost Roman Republic as a fragmented body; Virgil, Homer and the carvers of the Bible happily gave guts in celebration of glory. If even gore (itself an aesthetic, obscurantist word) can sway sentiments to opposing ideologies, to what linguistic device can a poet, whether pro-, anti-, and especially ambivalent (that is, ready to seek answers honestly) about war, resort that is not already burdened with multiple and contradictory meaning? A postmodern exploration of this very dilemma? Even eighteenth-century pro-war poetasters like Richard Blackmore once whipped themselves to frothy, self-conscious sublimities to face the challenge of depicting a battle. When one discovers this, one understands everything has been done to death.

Not that this has silenced anyone, nor should it. Indeed, while the war in Iraq has been losing support steadily ever since it started, war poetry (these days, the prefix “anti” can be assumed) has been received quite favorably. To date, “Poets Against the War,” an organization founded early in 2003 by poet and pacifist Sam Hamill, has collected 20,000 poems on its website. Moreover, Voices in Wartime, a movie documenting Hamill’s movement and the history of literary responses to war, was released last year, and with it an anthology of the same name edited by Andrew Himes.

Most notably, two single-author collections of war poetry garnered attention in 2005: Brian Turner’s debut collection, Here, Bullet, published in the U.S. by Alice James Books as part of its Beatrice Hawley prize series; and David Harsent’s eighth collection, Legion, which won the Forward Prize. Just like war, the awarding of literary prizes is politics, pursued by other means; and so it would be more surprising if a book of war poetry had not yet won an award in either country. By now trackers of such awards should be savvy enough to differentiate why something wins from its artistic merit. Readers should not bother asking, therefore, if either was deserving of accolades. Merit itself is a symptom of culture.
Therefore, what the rewarding of these volumes reveals about the expectations of British and American readers of poetry is a more interesting question to ask. Do these volumes merely enable us to stare blankly at, in Pound’s terms, an image of our accelerated grimace, or do they demand that we reconsider our understanding of war, either by posing a new problem or illuminating a known one in a nuanced way?

Both Turner’s and Harsent’s collections suggest that what’s left for war poets is the rejuvenation of old ideas with new language—be it of contemporary political rhetoric, the patois of particular war zones, the newest technology of destruction, etc.—and the diffusion of such verbiage into as many different imagined voices as possible. The goal here is a truth that admits its limitations. Achieving this is no small task (aspirants to Blake should apply), for it means not resorting to either the patriotic truths of epics and beer-hall ballads or their simple negations in satire and lampoon, but trying to harmonize all of these in a polyphony that includes the voices of the so-called enemy, not merely out of sympathy or empathy (a.k.a. guilt), but in bitterness, depression, rage, lament, and despair. Both writers are to varying degrees engaged with this project, and reading them together causes the moments where each succeeds and fails to emerge. It also teaches readers something about what’s at stake in the writing of war verse.

Turner is a veteran of the current war, and I (who have never served) bow to his experience of the grim realities of war. Even if the honesty of his emotions were ever in doubt, it would be disrespectful to impugn them. One may feel discomfort with the uncomplicated directness and plainness of its statement, however. Turner sees with an appropriative eye and speaks with an abstracting tongue. One does not get from his work many questions but rather foredrawn conclusions. This becomes evident when he gazes at a woman through a pair of binoculars in “Observation Post #798”:

When a woman walks out onto the rooftop
smoking a cigarette and shaking loose her long hair,
everyone wants what I hold in my hands,
but I am stilled by her, transported 7,600 miles
away, as a ghost might gaze upon the one he loves,

thinking, how lovely you are,
your pain and beauty a fiction
I bend into the form of a bridge, anything
to remind me I am still alive.

Here the poet sees an Iraqi woman for the taking. She is one whom “everyone” wants to stare at, not for her sake or on her own terms, but because she represents women beyond herself. Ignoring the individuality of this Iraqi woman’s beauty and pain, Turner “bends” her image into something usable, extends a metaphorical bridge from it to a lover at home, in the name of feeling alive. What might it mean instead to have drawn the bridge to the Iraqi herself, or her lover, or to have extended it from her to his own love? Turner’s “fiction” shapes life into standard forms. In a companion to this poem, “Observation Post #71,” the poet watches a shadowy “him in the circle of light / my rifle brings to me.” The poet observes by taking in what is brought to him, but not keenly. He does not seek truth but accepts simple platitudes such as, “Each life has its moment.”