Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting: Poems

by Kevin Powers

Overview

The award-winning author of The Yellow Birds returns with an extraordinary debut poetry collection.

National Book Award finalist, Iraq war veteran, novelist and poet Kevin Powers creates a deeply affecting portrait of a life shaped by war. Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting captures the many moments that comprise a soldier's life: driving down the Texas highway; waiting for the unknown in the dry Iraq heat; writing a love letter; listening to a mother recount her dreams.

Written with evocative language and discernment, Powers's poetry strives to make sense of the war and its echoes through human experience. Just as The Yellow Birds was hailed as the "first literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war," this collection will make its mark as a powerful, enduring work (Los Angeles Times).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316401081
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.75(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Kevin Powers is the author of The Yellow Birds, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and was a National Book Award Finalist, as well as Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, a collection of poetry. He was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the US Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Yellow Birds
"Extraordinary...A harrowing story about the friendship of two young men trying to stay alive on the battlefield...Brilliantly observed and deeply affecting." —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Powers is a poet first, so The Yellow Birds is spare, incredibly precise, unimproveable."—Dave Eggers, Observer

"Kevin Powers has produced a masterpiece of war literature and a classic."—Hilary Mantel, London Times

"A powerful work of art....Put it way up on that high rare shelf alongside Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien."—Anthony Swofford

From the Publisher

2014-03-20
Powers, author of the shattering war novel The Yellow Birds (2012), turns to poetry while concentrating on familiar themes of dislocation, fear and "unmoored memory." As with that novel, most of the poems in this slender collection occupy three spaces at once: Iraq, the home front and the liminal country between them. The longest and most striking piece likens the poem itself to an IED, "or improvised explosive device"; though it opens on a rather unpromising poetry-slam note ("If this poem had wires / coming out of it, / you would not read it"), Powers builds steadily on the extended metaphor of poem as bomb, the images growing steadily more gruesome ("if these words were your best / friend's legs, / dangling"). As is true of so many of the best poems about war—think Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" or James Wright's "Mad Fight Song for William S. Carpenter"—the tone is understated, the affect sometimes unnervingly flat; having seen what he has of combat, Powers can no longer be moved by ordinary emotions, and the language he uses at home is the language of battle: "I tell her I love her like not killing / or ten minutes of sleep / beneath the low rooftop wall / on which my rifle rests." And just as it is well that, as Robert E. Lee said, war is so horrible lest we come to love it too much, it is good that most books of poems about war, such as this one, are so short, lest we be overwhelmed by the grim news they bring. Powers sometimes wrestles with form, the length of his lines threatening to leave him breathless, but his intent is clear: He has survived, and though he now "know[s] better than to hope," he also knows that he has beaten the odds—and that he is not alone. A welcome debut. We hope that the next sequence finds Powers on safer ground, exploring the possibilities of life away from the front.

Kirkus Reviews