Brian Turner – Here, Bullet

Brian Turner is a soldier-poet who is the author of two poetry collections. He wrote his first poetry collection while he was serving in Iraq.

Portal poeatinthecity.co.uk writes:

His first poetry collection Here, Bullet about his experience as a soldier in Iraq was widely acclaimed as perhaps the most powerful poetry to come out of that conflict. It won a host of prizes including the Beatrice Hawley Award in 2005. His second collection, Phantom Noise, was shortlisted for the prestigious TS Eliot prize in 2010.

One of Brian’s biggest British fans is Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine who has acknowledged Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet as an influence on her own music.

In Rhyme and Reason from 2011 r. for BBC Radio 4, Flo talks about Turnerze and reads his poem ‘Here, Bullet’. (4:40)

‘Three years ago, I was quite lucky to go to the reading and Brian Turner was at this reading. He was a soldier in Iraq and he is a war poet. Contemporary war poetry. You know, he served and he used to write his poems in secret at night. And he kept this one poem in his breast pocket. As a sort of a talisman over his heart to protect him. He spoke really beautifully what his ideas of death were. When you kill someone, you kill the whole world. You kill all of the perceptions of it.’

Because here, Bullet, here is where I complete the word you bring hissing through the air, here is where I moan the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have inside of me, each twist of the round spun deeper, because here, Bullet, here is where the world ends, every time.