Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

We have few poetic chroniclers of war and even fewer as eloquent as Powers is in his first collection after the multi-award-winning novel The Yellow Birds. Two of the four sections cover the Iraq war and its aftermath in stark, vivid language, with many of the poems revealing how it felt to be a machine gunner in Mosul and Tel Afar, as Powers was. What the poet conveys best is the draining necessity of making difficult choices continuously during battle: "that for at least one day I don't have to decide/ between dying and shooting a little boy." Sometimes Powers uses understatement to describe the immensity of war, as in the title poem: "that war is just us/ making little pieces of metal/ pass through each other." Even more poignant are poems that describe the difficult days after a buddy returns home: "he wishes/ he had died instead of living/ houseboundbedboundmindboundbodybound/ like a child, watching/ as his mother watched/ the roads, pitted and seeded." Longer poems like "Improvised Explosive Device" and "The Locks of the James" could have used some word winnowing, as the lack of concision dilutes some of the energy. Elsewhere, though, Powers surprises us by moving beyond a military focus and including references to art, literature, and photography.