Facing up to personal grief and the horrors of war

Brian Turner secretly wrote his first collection of poetry while in Iraq with the US army. He will read this week in Cork, writes Colette Sheridan.

The battlefield of personal grief is what now concentrates poet and US army veteran, Brian Turner, who is in Cork mentoring writers as the inaugural John Montague International Poetry Fellow. He will also read from and discuss his work at the Cork International Poetry Festival this week.

Brian Turner will attend Cork International Poetry Festival this week

While Turner burst onto the literary scene with the publication of his award-winning poetry collection, Here, Bullet in 2005, written secretly while on active service in Iraq, he has turned away from the brutality of war as he deals with the death of his wife, poet Ilyse Kusnetz, who died of cancer in 2016.

Turner’s second collection, Phantom Noise (shortlisted for the 2010 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry) also deals with war. But he points out that in all his writing, love and loss continue to be the main themes. He is also the author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country.

Aged 50, Turner did not become a poet as a result of going to war. He completed an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) course in creative writing before joining the army.

“Before my first published book, there were seven other manuscripts on a wide variety of subjects. It appears that I’m a war writer but when I look at myself, I see a longer arc. I have a book coming out this month called The Kiss. As editor, I asked over 40 different literary writers to write about kissing. Not the Hollywood kiss but real life ones; the difficult ones, the ambiguous ones, the beautiful ones.”

Turner is also writing a fictional book about “the idea of the wall in Mexico and how destructive that view is. I’m not actually talking about ‘the wall’ but about immigration and identity as a nation. When I look at Trump and the American people, I realise that we have to look at ourselves as a people and what Trump represents in the body politic.

"We’re in a really difficult position. I really think that we have a lot of soul searching to do as a nation. Trump is almost like a canary in the coal mine signalling that the education system has broken down. People can’t analytically or psychologically think through questions. The evidence is that Trump has been elected to office.”

Turner didn’t vote for Trump but says he understands the mindset of those that did. “My family (voted for him). I’ve had see-sawing debates that have come to no good end. There’s a wall between us.”

Orlando-based Turner is director of the Master of Fine Arts programme at Sierra Nevada College at Lake Tahoe. He does a lot of his work remotely and also gives readings all over America.

“I go to a city like New York but I’ll also go out to the middle of Iowa. You can see the silos for grain and the old tractors and derelict country. There’s a lot of pain and struggle out there.”

Turner, who doesn’t have children, says his way of coping with his wife’s death is to bury my head in work. “I had been working on several projects with Ilyse. I want to figure out some way of continuing to collaborate with her.”

To this end, Turner (a self-described “hack musician”) and jazz bassist, Benjamin Kramer, are working on an album based on one of Ilyse's poems.

“I’ve taken as much audio of her that I could find, from poetry readings and tapes of conversations she had while doing some journalistic work. We’ve woven that into the music. It’s an attempt at immortality.”

Asked why he joined the army, Turner says the “easy answer is that I come from a long line of military tradition in my family. I ended up writing my memoir to try and answer that question. It still doesn’t fully answer it.”

For Turner, being in active service was one chapter in his life. He feels deeply sorry for the Iraqi people for whom war “has been a way of life for so long. I don’t know how they go to the market to get lettuce.”

Brian Turner will be reading from his work on Wednesday at the Cork Arts Theatre as part of the Cork International Poetry Festival.www.corkpoetryfest.net