Brian Turner served for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq from 2003. Turner's is a powerful poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty and skill, offering unflinching accurate description but no moral judgement, leaving the reader to draw any conclusions. Here he reads six poems from his two collections, HERE, BULLET and PHANTOM NOISE, giving a harrowing, first-hand account of the Iraq War. The poems are: 'Here, Bullet', 'Hwy 1', 'Eulogy', '16 Iraqi Policemen', 'The Inventory from a Year Sleeping with Bullets' and 'At Lowe's Home Improvement Center'. HERE, BULLET was published in the US by Alice James Books in 2005 and in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. Published by both publishers in the US and UK in 2010, PHANTOM NOISE includes poems dealing with the traumatic aftermath of war: flashbacks explode the daily hell of Baghdad into the streets and malls of peaceful California, sending Turner's imagination reeling back to Iraq, as in the last poem he reads in this video. This video is an excerpt from a film made at Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2011 by Neil Astley, who has been assisting Pamela Robertson-Pearce in filming poets reading their work for Bloodaxe's archive, website and DVD-books. Her first DVD-book, IN PERSON (edited by Neil Astley), was published by Bloodaxe in 2008, including films of 30 poets with an anthology containing all the poems read on the films. More footage from the film of Brian Turner will be made available at a later date.
