Brian Turner gave a stiring reading of his poetry at The South Bank Centre in the afternoon of 30 October. Sometimes standing, sometimes sitting, Turner had his back to an aquatinted view over the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, then the Thames towards the Barbican Centre. This Brutalist aesthetic did not diminish the watery quality of the late autumn sunshine or the tone of Turner's delivery. However, this aesthetic is important, read on.
Looking distinctly "beefier" than photos from two years ago suggest, Turner provided his audience with accounts of sleeping in a bed once occupied by Dick Cheney and how he remains in contact with friends of the suicide, PFC Miller, but not Miller's family. Despite leaving Iraq and the US military, Turner's mind remains. His poem, "At Lowe's Home Improvement Center" is simultaneously a psychotic episode and a critique of "normalcy", undisclosed "collateral damage" and the degeneration of language as a political expedient.
This theme is more easily quoted in "Howl Wind", which ends:
"......a mortar round
howls a night wind over the city,
and just where it lands
we will see."
The theme of city as target and barricade, unidentified, scared and scarred returns in Turner's new poems. Turner challenged the audience that afternoon, to identify where the next random violent act would happen. He did this without irony, with considerable charm and without turning to face the view over towards the Barbican Centre. That view struck me as the same as the Twin Towers before they fell down.
