Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting is the debut poetry collection by Kevin Powers, author of the National Book Award finalist The Yellow Birds. Most of the poems directly address the experience and aftermath of war. All reflect the effort to make sense of it. Some seem to question the value of trying to say anything at all: "I tell her I love her like not killing/ or ten minutes of sleep," Powers writes, in the title poem about the jarring contradiction of composing a love letter in the midst of battle. "I tell her how Pvt Bartle says, offhand,/ that war is just/ making little pieces of metal/ pass through each other."
Other poems are more abstract in their speculation about the atrocity of war. "Photographing the Suddenly Dead" begins with a long reflection on the idea of impermanence and the meaning of objects, until it becomes clear that its real subject is the speaker's guilt, triggered by the memory of a photograph of a young man killed in battle. Powers often uses beautiful lyrical language and aphoristic observations to get at deeper truths, as though his real subject is too dark, too immense, to approach head-on.
Much contemporary poetry celebrates a compressed intensity of line. These poems are looser, more accessible and more narrative in structure, using visceral images and vignettes to portray the worst that humanity can experience in a collection that will leave the reader changed. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer