Brian Turner

They're poems about love and loss.

That's the actual subject.

So I don't see that changing in future books.

But the landscape, you know, the landscapes here are tanks and helicopters.

But there might be a very different landscape.

But the underpinning will be very similar, probably.

Eulogy It happens on a Monday at 11.20 a.m.

as tower guards eat sandwiches and seagulls drift by on the Tigris River.

Prisoners tilt their heads to the west, though burlap sacks and duct tape blind them.

The sound reverberates down concertina coils, though a piano wire thrums when given slack.

And it happens like this on a blue day of sun, when Private Miller pulls the trigger to take brass and fire into his mouth.

The sound lifts the birds up off the water.

A mongoose pauses under the orange trees.

And nothing can stop it now, no matter what blur of motion surrounds him, no matter what voices crackle over the radio in static confusion, because if only for this moment the earth is stilled and Private Miller has found what low hush there is down in the eucalyptus shade there by the river.

Some of the things I come back to are, you know, it says the sound lifts the birds up off the water.

It says a mongoose pauses under the orange trees.

And I remember thinking afterwards, a couple years later, I remember thinking, what was it?

I'd seen a mongoose.

This was the first time I'd ever seen a mongoose when I was there.

And at first I thought it was a squirrel, but I looked in the way it moved, and then just instantly I realized it was an actual mongoose.