When Kevin Powers’ debut novel, Yellow Birds, arrived on our shelves, Austen wouldn’t stop ranting and raving about it. I read it to shut him up, but truth be told, the book shut me up too. (You can read his blog here)
A Michener fellow, Kevin Powers studied poetry and fiction, and it shows in his work—stunning prose and poetry with a good story. It’s the best of both worlds.
I had reservations about Powers’ poetry (What if it was horrible? What if he should have just stuck with fiction?) because, lets be honest here: poetry is not everyone’s cup of tea, and even if it is, poetry readers are a pretty picky bunch.
But Powers does something on the page that is rare; he makes us experience the speaker’s emotions. They aren’t just real, they are us (and not just the speaker— we’re the young republicans with popped collars, the boy in the dusty velour suite, the pretty girl at the Fourth of July celebration).
Letters Composed During a Lull in the Fighting follow an unnamed speaker through his return from Iraq and reintegration into society. We learn about his childhood, his mother’s pond, his fear and anxiety and regret.
Sometimes, when the wind blows so certainly
you feel that it is spring, regardless of the season,
there is no cause to comment on it. It goes,
and if it passes over a child
in a carriage at the end of the sidewalk,
you would be forgiven for not noticing
the one moment in our life
you were allowed to see the holy.
The poems accuse the reader. He is not trying to shock us with accounts of the terror on the front—as was the case with WWI poets—nor honoring the bravery of his comrades like 19th century poets. He is not cursing the “establishment/government/man.” The war in Power’s poems is not the result of a tyrannical dictator nor about war crimes. Rather, we are all standing accused. We are accused not of violence or arm-chair criticism. Rather we are accused of being human. Of having fear and shame and responsibility. We are guilty of not being dead.
The poems are not so much about war, but about our own insignificance. In war and peace, overseas and here, we don’t’ matter except to ourselves.
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