Brian Turner
Brian Turners book Here, Bullet won the
Poets’ Prize in 2007.
From Fresno, California, Brian Turner has seen his poems published in poetry daily, the atlantic review and several other publications. His poems have also appeared in the voices in wartime anthology. Turner is an MFA graduate of the University of Oregon and a US army veteran.
The poems on the pages of Here, Bullet, with their immediacy of impact, their universality of theme, their blend of cultural and historical insight, and their many tiered reverberations of the aftermath of gut wrenching violence, make for a powerful reading experience…..
“The poems on the pages of Here, Bullet, with their immediacy of impact, their universality of theme, their blend of cultural and historical insight, and their many tiered reverberations of the aftermath of gut wrenching violence, make for a powerful reading experience….The relationship Turner establishes with the reader is not dialogue but a tidal insistence on reflection, that if there is meaning in loss, there must be meaning in what precedes loss, in what is related to loss. There is no harm in such reflection, argues Here, Bullet, but, rather harm stems from the lack of it.” – The Franklin Journal
This interview took place at the House Hotel in Galway , April 2008. I had met Brian two weeks previously when he was reading at the Poetry Now festival in Dun Laoighaire. He returned to Galway as poet in residence for the Cuirt International Festival of Writing. In the course of this interview he speaks, among other things, about the duality of being a soldier and a poet and his experience of the Iraq war.
NB Brian’s interview for The Parlour Review will be uploaded shortly.
Brian Turner reads for The Parlour Review
© Brian Turner reading Night in Blue
video © Marion Kelly
