Todd Hearon’s first book of poems, Strange Land, is one of several recent collections—along with Catherine Sasanov’s Had Slaves, Pam Bernard’s Blood Garden, and Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise—exploring themes of violent conflict and national identity. The cover of Hearon’s Strange Land features a menacing Mickey Mouse-like character emerging from an anthropomorphic map of the United States—the allusive strange land, one assumes. Inside, the poems, written against the background of America’s current wars of choice, bring even graver meaning to Hearon’s title: strange land is a kind of no-man’s-land, a geography of our worst collective flaws.

As disquieting as much of the work in this collection is, however, Strange Land offers some hope. Many of Hearon’s poems do extraordinary work to discover moments of communion, precariously situated in times of conflict. “It was the past, could have been many pasts,” he writes in “Ancestors”:

I sat down, we all sat down together.

One offered grace, I saw the fingers fall

over the loaves that never can be broken

though they be shattered, pulled apart as loves.

A reader will encounter both loss and connection here in the pulling apart of loaves, turned loves. Similarly, in “The Singers,” which speaks to life’s casualties, “the hawk’s / indifference to the hare’s terror,” Hearon salvages a sense of our shared humanity, our ability to sing our fundamental truths.

Whether describing communion or the warlike tendencies of the species, Hearon’s poems are finely drawn and impress with their subtle gravity. A case in point is the poem “Translation,” broken into seven otherwise continuous parts, whose final stanza suggests a “thing of grace,” a creature or aircraft of unknown origin, as much an image of battle as of birdwatching:

it seemed a thing of grace,

it seemed a thing

swam over us in flight,

imagining

the bone white wing.

A more explicit reference to war occurs in “Harry Farr,” an anti-war poem that avoids high-handed declarations. The poet relies on the frank admissions of his narrator, a dissenting WWI soldier facing his execution. Speaking of his experience in the trenches, Farr says: “...Hell / is like that. You can hear it in the dawn / in the dark disconsolate labyrinthine scream / of shells my memory’s almost become....” Farr’s words resound with the trauma of experience, but they are Hearon’s words, too, and at their best, they read like song or prayer. Continues Farr:

I am becoming one with time,

the rifles cocked, my brothers in a line

like ripening corn—all ears, all ears—

 

I pity them. Would I were not the cause.

I would not add to this eternity of noise.

Catherine Sasanov’s Had Slaves is based on her discovery of the personal and legal papers of her Missouri ancestors. The resulting poems are imaginative articulations of a thorough investigation into her family’s complicity in the American slave trade. Sasanov explores deeply personal realms with an attempt at scholarly distance: the volume contains six pages of endnotes detailing the poet’s research. For this reader, the notes are not necessary: the poems are documents in themselves. As in “Robert E. Lee on the living room wall,” a line from “Portrait of the Author as a Six-Year-Old Yankee,” Sasanov’s poems create disturbing portraits, images resurrected and exhibited with an historian’s purpose and a descendant’s regret.

In “How Long It Takes, Burying the Dead,” we learn that

Hell hath no fury

like a woman rising up

from her cellar in the middle

of a war—

“How Long It Takes...” speaks to the overarching motivation of the collection: burying the dead by first resurrecting them. The poor miller in the poem tends to his land after the Civil War battles that have taken place there. Encountering the dead, his “plow’s tongue snags on their ribs.” Sasanov’s boldest lines occur in this poem, among them, the singular “Time’s a fist to the mouth—.” At their best, Sasanov’s poems address her theme more generally, go beyond her family line; in other words, Had Slaves offers a portrait of an historic period through a national lens as well as through the lens of a family crisis.

In Blood Garden, Pam Bernard borrows from the mythopoetic imagery of the Great War period. Red poppies, which reportedly grew in uncanny abundance from the mass graves of soldiers, signified the blood of the dead—a garden brutally sown. Bernard’s borrowing of pre- and postwar imagery is selective and powerful. Even her references to the poetic pastoral are laden with appropriate irony:

This once was the forest primeval, greenwood

of myth and legend. Motherland,

Fatherland, Arcadia—now

a midden of offal.

 

(“March 1918, Chemin des Dames Sector, the line north of Soisson” )

The gruesome imagery of “a midden of offal” echoes the garden of the book’s title, sprung from the loss of lives. The loss goes even deeper, altering Arcadia to resemble a landscape of death. We hear soldiers speaking throughout the book, when they are not being spoken for by an omniscient poet-voice. “One barrage lasted nine days,” a soldier recalls, and the poet intervenes:

In the intermittent lull, he can hear,

amid black clouds of swarming flies,

the high-pitched squealing of well-fed

rats. And, sublime absurdity—

the altogether beautiful song of a lark.

Bernard captures the ironic circumstances—call it “sublime absurdity— / the altogether beautiful...”—first characterized by the Great War. The beauty she conveys differs starkly from, say, the prewar nocturne of a nightingale; hers is a lark’s song, which for a soldier in the trenches meant the announcement of a night survived, and a new day.

Here and there, the front and home, and the imagined proximity or distance between the two interest Bernard, whose research into the period included reading soldier’s journals, memoirs, and letters home. No-man’s-land again comes to mind, as the poet merges memories of home with the immediate experiences of battle. In her poems, nothing and no one are where they belong, or where one remembers them having been:

Near Flirey, a huge flowering cherry,

somehow spared the fate of all things

living on this earth, weeps in profusion

amid the black stumps of trees.

The soldier, reminded of home, of his father and mother beckoning him down from a tree to do his chores, leaves night patrol to climb the lone-standing tree and holler back to his buddies in the trench. Bernard’s alliteration and near-rhyme of “Flirey,” a battleground, and the “flowering cherry,” is unsettling, to say the least. With touches like these, she expertly uncovers the dichotomous nature of war: out of necessity, home is found in desolation, enemy lines close by. Similarly, she finds contradiction in the memorializing of the dead, in symbols like the Arc de Triomphe, so distant from the anonymous corpses they were meant to lift “up from chaos and anonymity, given / the weight of all that dying....”

With his first collection Here, Bullet, Brian Turner reminded readers that traditionally war poetry has been written by soldier-poets with firsthand experience in combat. Turner’s second book, Phantom Noise, continues to bear witness. The poem “Al-A’imma Bridge” tells of the tragedy that took place when a bomb threat in a crowd of worshipping Iraqi civilians led to a deadly stampede. Turner imagines the individual deaths as a soldier might, looking on with equal parts courage and concern, but also as a poet whose language is always drawing comparisons, shifting the picture to encompass not just one tragedy, but a world’s worth:

and the dead watch as they are swept downstream—

witness to the soft, tender lips of the river fish

who kiss the calves and fingertips of these newly dead,

curious to see how lifeless bodies stare hard

into the dark envelopment, hands

waving to the far shore

The poem is long, and Turner, aware of its movements and momentum, builds upon it stanza by stanza, until the stampede becomes a metaphor for a collective mentality, one that has led to the destruction caused by wars generally, throughout history: “Scheherazade falls too, worn out, exhausted / from her life-saving work, made speechless by the scale of war, / and Ali Baba with an AK-47 beside her….”

Some of the poems attempt to take us home, where the mundane details of Turner’s California life, like the sound of nails spilling onto concrete flooring “constant as shells,” remind the poet that there is no return from certain experiences. In “At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center,” memories reposition the poet to the sites of modern warfare: “Mower blades are just mower blades / and the Troy-Bilt-Self-Propelled Mower doesn’t resemble a Blackhawk or an Apache….” But his assurances are unconvincing: we can’t help seeing the Blackhawk and Apache that we are told aren’t there. In these poems, the mind of the voice is always wandering, traveling, and, as in Hearon’s and Bernard’s poems, the where is secondary to the greater unanswerables, why and how. Turner’s poems come close to answering the latter by performing the transmutation of lawn mower to war machine, and inversely, of enemy combatant to fellow soldier and common sufferer.