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. Reviewers praised the novel for its raw depiction of the Iraq war and poetic observations about its meaning, qualities that are abundant in this collection.
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." The power of this poem derives from the way its last brutal image depersonalizes war, followed immediately by the realization that doing so requires the narrator to depersonalize everything, including love.
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.
Later poems, especially, begin to reflect the effort to live in a world where the writer's shattering experience is his alone, one not shared by those he loves. "If I'm honest, mine is the only history/ that really interests me, which is unfortunate,/ because I am not alone," observes the character near the end of the collection. It is a haunting observation, but what we are left is the accumulation of images depicting the monstrosities of a world gone wrong. A mother's hand covering her face in a familiar and remembered gesture becomes the anticipation of an expression of horror on hearing the worst news possible.
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
Shelf Talker: Kevin Powers, an army veteran who served in Iraq, offers an accessible debut collection of poetry and prose-poems that deepens the themes explored in his award-winning novel, The Yellow Birds.