Listening to Phantom Noise

Since his return from Iraq six years ago, Brain Turner has become familiar with the rocky terrain between the reality of his civilian life and his memories of the battlefield. He depicts this startling mental landscape in Phantom Noise (recently shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize), his acclaimed second collection of poetry.  Sarah Crown offers an insightful critique of the collection and a compelling conversation with the poet in the Guardian:

And yet it's the silence surrounding the conflict that finally pulled the poems of his new collection out of him. "America has several wars going on right now, but I found back home that you wouldn't know it. It's like," he pauses, groping for a word strong enough, "an obscenity. I realised I had to find images that created doorways between the two realities. In a world where so many people can be put in the earth with so little known about them, it seems there's a kind of psychic disconnect that needs to be attended to."

Turner recently returned from Belgrade, Serbia where he served as a NATO peacekeeper ten years ago, and his account of his trip was featured in our "Open Door" section. Check it out here.