Review of
The Dead Peasant’s Handbook,
by Brian Turner

Reviewed by Dale Cottingham

When Brian Turner, poet, editor, holder of fellowships, author of five poetry collections, including the recent The Dead Peasant’s Handbook (Alice James Books, 2023), is definitive, we have a duty to take note. For in this current disturbance we call America, we have come to be jaundiced, expecting few things to be joyful. But for Turner, widower who, being truly in love, lost his life partner, and as a war veteran and so a witness to its kinetic horror, his words, lines, the very poetic structure (dare I employ the word “form”?) do not appear sua sponte on the page, but his utterances are direct, as if compelled to speak by sorrow too deep to ignore. And it is just there, in the compelling that Turner reveals in poem after stunning poem, not bitterness–Lord knows that that would be the usual human reaction to what he’s endured–but he gives us this:

and we call it a life

we call it by name   we gesture to one another   say Love

I see you   I see all that you have gathered from the void   that

that assembly   that sweet and beautiful construction

and though you are only a vision   I see you

(“All Our Lazy Sundays,” page 74)

So, Turner, having been in the world, lived its war and loss, remains with the upturned face. The poems are clear-eyed, they act with precision as scalpel and cure in the same motion. They are the product of a generous soul.

Divided into four sections, the first brings us face to face with war, what is violent, “born of the obscene” (“Sunflower,” p. 3), Turner advising to open your mouth to “avoid rupturing your eardrums” (“Sunflower,” p. 3) evoking the shocking vulnerability amid violence, yet serving a pragmatic need. Later in the section Turner passes a dead woman on the road, her corpse rotting, as she “continues perfecting her task” (“Twelve Roses for the Dead,” p. 7), and recalls another woman holding a photograph of “her son’s missing face” (“South Korea Molotov Cocktail,” p. 15). From the fog of war, Turner derives a purpose, as if the mission of the surviving soldiers is to demonstrate that life is fragile. It is by chance, he tells us, that we escape, that we are alive, missing the bullet that skips “along the surface of a wall.” (“Sunflower,” p. 3).

Section two is composed of a single poem (“Metal Flume Fever,” p. 23), exploring a night where he goes to bed alone, his eyes weld “shut” (p. 23), to do the work of dreams, and in this work he is joined by another, surely his wife. They glide “the surface” (p. 24), and lay, in his imagination, in “an enormous heart”:

I imagine that heart, among the unaccountable
hearts sketched in sand . . .

these missives given to the sea by lovers

returned by the tidal swell of the moon,

that we might lie down in a tangle of seaweed

and wreckage, embracing one another . . .

(pages 26-7)

The meditation, employing elastic long lines, gives us a relaxed tone, and sparse punctuation that highlights breath, as if to say that by way of this dream I have a place to contemplate my most deeply felt loss. Yet, underlying the structure. I am reminded of Robert Frost’s beautiful imagery which so often belie the darkness I love, ribboning Turner’s lines like mourning hands, declaring the poet scarred by sorrow: she is gone, gone forever, and when he wakes, he finds himself alone, his “mouth is blue” (p. 32).

Yet Turner is not done with love, or for that matter loss, as he reveals in section three, aptly entitled Love and Loss. This section further explores love in communication with his wife’s ghost in the brilliantly framed portrait, spoken by the persona of Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa, who is inspired to tenderness and love of the speaker as she listens to his speech in sleep of love for his wife, Alexa wishes she dared “to whisper the words you most want to hear/the way a lover might turn in his sleep to kiss you/and you don’t even know it” (p. 49).

In the final section, the poems act as dénouement and coda, each one granular, about his love, about now being alone, and remind this reviewer of Phillip Levine, an early mentor of Turner’s, who took great care to give us lovely lines that, in observant detail, told us not only what he saw/felt/heard, but what it means. And so does Turner, and it means much: a reaching, a searching, it means that he gives us his words, his generous soul.

The poems are earthly, earthy. They linger like a favorite landscape or deeply felt song. I highly recommend this book. I keep it on my bedside table. I keep its lines in my mind.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 3.

See all items about Dale Cottingham
Visit Dale Cottingham’s contributors page.
See all items about Brian Turner
Visit Brian Turner’s contributors page.