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Friday, September 10, 2010

"Phantom Noise," more


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Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday September 10, 2010
    PHANTOM NOISE
    Brian Turner
    Alice James
    ISBN 978-1882295807
    93 pages
    $16.95

    Reviewed by Courtney Cook, who is a freelance writer from New York.
    Before the film appeared, before Kathryn Bigelow was a household name, before the Academy Award, there was Brian Turner's "The Hurt Locker," a deceptively simple poem about a soldier exhausted by nights of mortar fire. "Nothing but the hurt left here," writes Turner. "Nothing but bullets and pain / and the bled out slumping." It's one of the poems in Turner's 2005 collection, "Here, Bullet," a book written by a young infantryman without politics and with eyes wide open.
    In his new collection, "Phantom Noise," Turner is the same soldier, with the same keen eye, but he is even more battle-weary. Taken together, these books are an unusual two-part portrait of a decade of war: its strength, its wounds, its fantasies of home and, as it happens, the strange beauty of a stubbornly foreign culture. Taken alone, "Phantom Noise" is an unsettling plunge into a returned soldier's dislocation. Through images that recur again and again, from Iraq to a podium in Colorado, from a field hospital to a pristine day on Puget Sound, we go deep inside this soldier's relief, grief and alienation.
    Here is the former warrior in "At Lowe's Home Improvement Center":
    Standing in aisle 16, the hammer and anchor aisle,
    I bust a 50 pound box of double-headed nails
    open by accident, their oily bright shanks
    and diamond points like firing pins
    from M-4s and M-16s.
    Here is the returned soldier, nagged by the specter of American torture, in "Sleeping in Dick Cheney's Bed":
    Cheney's hands
    like a preacher's delivering me deeper into the truth,
    with a gasp of air, a flash of light, to be plunged back down
    the way he offers midges and blood worms and rusty scuds
    to the cloudy river, running 1400 cubic feet per second,
    until I cough up the fictional and beg for the heartland's
    fluid clarity, salvation, the charity of forgiveness, anything.
    Then, in the same poem, the soldier's own guilt rises up:
    what does it say about me, that the Pinot Grigio
    tasted so good on my tongue ...
    that I can return to Cheney's room after midnight,
    strip my clothes off to curl in the bed
    where he too has slept, the sheets a sublime reprieve
    for my tired frame, the night a perfection of sleep.
    These poems work a bit like the bomb blasts that echo through them, breaking down assumptions, unearthing shards of insight that help explain why, when it comes to war, we are so much at odds with ourselves.
    Turner is, of course, in the strong company of other contemporary soldier writers. "Kaboom," Matt Gallagher's half comic, half heartbreaking hour-by-hour account, boasts a subtitle that says it all: "Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War." There's also "Lone Survivor," Marcus Luttrell's best-selling, knuckle-biting exemplar of bravery and humanity in Afghanistan. But it's a civilian, Rory Stewart, author of "The Places in Between," to whom Turner is closest in tone. Both men write with unusual detachment. In Turner's "Unearthed by Wind," for example, death pairs easily with beauty:
    When the winds drive south from Anatolia,
    down through western Iraq and into the Kuwaiti
    borderlands, the dunes shift in waves, an ocean
    cresting in a swirl of dust the camels traverse
    at nightfall. The wind presses on, curving
    over parietal bones, smoothing them
    like river stones where no water runs --
    grain by grain an entire skull
    emerging, its hourglass sockets
    staring out at the world once more.
    This is a writer who is less warrior than observer, someone whose curiosity, knowledge and tenderness allow insight into landscapes and people that terrify the rest of us.
    He's a guy who does his research, too. The endnotes of "Phantom Noise" reference anthologies of Iraqi poetry, both contemporary and dating as far back as A.D. 646, and he quotes Iraqi prophets, political leaders, news reports and local languages. There's even a note about an Iraqi cookbook, Nawal Nasrallah's "Delights from the Garden of Eden."
    It's hard to think of a better way around ideology than poetry like this. Turner shows us soldiers who are invincible and wounded, a nation noble and culpable, and a war by turns necessary and abominable. He brings us closer to our own phantom guilt and speaks the words that we both do and do not want to hear.

    Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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    A JOURNEY: My Political Life
    Tony Blair
    Knopf
    ISBN 978 0 307 26983 6
    700 pages
    $35

    Reviewed by Leonard Downie Jr.
    Toward the end of this well-written and perhaps unintentionally self-revealing memoir, Tony Blair, who was Britain's prime minister during an eventful decade from 1997 to 2007, insists he is "trying valiantly not to fall into self-justifying mode -- a bane of political memoirs." But he has done just that.
    He defends vigorously his close, ultimately unpopular partnership with President George W. Bush in the prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He laments resistance by the British people, his own Labour Party and hostile news media to major change in Britain's economic, education, health care, crime-fighting and social policies. And he blames his longtime rival and politically unsuccessful successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, for undermining him and the centrist "New Labour" transformation of their party and government that was Blair's career-long quest.
    Blair does not tell readers much about himself directly. He writes nothing about his parents, childhood or schooling, and little more about his wife, Cherie, a British lawyer, or their children, beyond passing references to life in Downing Street. A questionable real estate deal involving Cherie serves primarily as grist for Blair's bitter feud with the editor of the conservative Daily Mail newspaper. And Blair mentions little about the Christian faith that has played a large role in his life.
    Instead, Blair reveals himself through his thrusting political ambition, his rationales for decision-making, his preoccupation with public image and his determination to play a prominent role on the world stage. "I always reckoned that even the ones who didn't like me (quite a few) or didn't agree with me (a large proportion) still admired the fact I counted, was a big player, was a world and not just a national leader," Blair writes. "Our (British) leaders should stand out, and if not cut a dash, at least make an impact."
    World events -- particularly wars in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq -- dominated much of Blair's 10 years as prime minister, as they do this book. Blair roots his philosophy about the use of military force in his response to Serbia's murderous ethnic cleansing of Muslim Albanians in Kosovo province in 1999. He portrays himself as "extraordinarily forward in advocating a military solution," rather than "a deal" with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, thereby putting "the most colossal strain on my personal relationship" with then President Bill Clinton. Milosevic finally agreed to withdraw Serbian forces after Clinton moved closer to joining Blair in committing ground troops to the conflict. "Why was I so keen to act?" Blair writes. "I saw it essentially as a moral issue."
    Similarly, in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Blair states a "moral case for action" in partnering with the United States in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "It was also in our national interest to defeat this menace," he adds, "and if we wanted to play a major role in shaping the conduct of any war, we had to be there at the outset."
    In particular, Blair argues a moral case for removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq because of the suffering of Iraqis under his rule. He also reiterates his support for continuing to fight insurgents and terrorists there and in Afghanistan that he says are backed by al-Qaeda and Iran, "an enemy doing as much wrong as it can to prevent us from doing what is right." He separates himself only from former Vice President Dick Cheney, who, he writes, "would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it -- Hezbollah, Hamas, etc." And he portrays himself as busily helping President Bush -- in numerous notes, phone calls and visits -- to consider carefully his war strategy and to seek international and United Nations support.
    Blair insists that his government never knowingly misled the British people about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war, in that the intelligence was wrong. "There was no big 'lie' about WMD," he writes. "You can examine the intelligence I had received on various government websites." Blair acknowledges a serious mistake (that Iraq could deploy WMDs within 45 minutes) in an intelligence "dossier" his government released before the war. But he angrily denies that any of his aides "sexed up" the dossier, as alleged by the BBC. The ensuing controversy resulted in the suicide of a government intelligence expert, the resignation of two top BBC executives, an unbridgeable breach between Blair and the British broadcast giant, and his unshakeable sense of persecution by much of the British news media.
    "The intelligence was wrong. We admitted it," Blair writes about the dossier affair, which stoked British anti-war and anti-Blair sentiments. "Given Saddam's history, it was an understandable error. But it leads to a headline that doesn't satisfy today's craving for a scandal. A mistake doesn't hit the register high enough. So the search goes on for a lie, a deception, an act not of error but of malfeasance. And the problem is, if one can't be found, one is contrived or even invented."
    Blair even regrets one of the historic achievements of his government: passage of Britain's first Freedom of Information Act. "The truth is that the FOI Act isn't used, for the most part, by 'the people,'" he complains. "It's used by journalists. For political leaders, it's like saying to someone who is hitting you over the head with a stick, 'Hey, try this instead,' and handing them a mallet."
    In the end, as he was deciding to resign and hand over party and country to Brown, Blair believes he should have defined leadership "not as knowing what the people wanted and trying to satisfy them, but knowing what I thought was in their best interests and trying to do it." For anyone who wants to know what that may be, Blair's book is filled with his domestic and foreign policy prescriptions for Britain and the rest of the world.
    This is a notably wistful memoir. "It has never been entirely clear," Blair concludes, "whether the journey I have taken is one of triumph of the person over the politics, or of the politics over the person."
    Leonard Downie Jr., a former London correspondent, is a vice president of The Washington Post and a journalism professor at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. He can be reached at downiel(at symbol)washpost.com.

    Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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