NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

An independent small press poetry review

NHI independent review
WAR IS A DANGEROUS PLACE
edited by D J Tyrer
Atlantean Publishing
38 Pierrot Steps
71 Kursaal Way
Southend on Sea
Essex
SS1 2UY
UK
£1
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This page last updated: 10th December 2007. 		WAR IS A DANGEROUS PLACE

This 24-page stapled booklet gets its title from one of George Bush's scarily funny statements,

I think war is a dangerous place
and is
Dedicated to all those affected by war, terror and man’s inhumanity to man.
This is a theme that can lead to great poetry, as past war writers have shown, but it also holds the risk of leading the poet into rants and sensationalism. Exploiting the suffering of others for the sake of a poem is another accusation the war poet can attract.

The poets in this short collection have approached their subject in a variety of styles. There's a willingness to state opinions explicitly, which can work as a contrast to more indirect approaches, and perhaps in a booklet dedicated to anti-war many readers would expect this style. The poems would certainly work well in performance.

D.J. Tyrer uses an ironic voice in WAR ON TERROR to describe the simplistic views of world leaders:

	It must be nice to live in their world 
	A world that is so black and white. 
	Where "neo-conservatives" are lovable chaps 
	And the foreigner is clearly the foe.
In THE MILITARY ROUTE he puts into poetry the joke based on army recruitment posters:
	Join the army and get taught (indoctrinated) 
	See places around the world (occupy them) 
	Meet interesting people (and shoot them) 
	Build yourself a future (and die).
Eric Ferris also uses dark humour in FOREIGN HORRORS, where a nursery rhyme rhythm undercuts the subject:
	Snapping fingers, snapping bones, static on your telephones. 
	Sickle moonlight, sickle cells, from uranium spent shells. 
	Flow, glow, the merr-i-o 
	Grimly reaping we will go.
At the start of ATTACK HELICOPTER Nick Armbrister realises that the beauty of an image can be more striking than an explicit rant as he combines a suggestion of mechanical perfection with one of nature’s most perfectly evolved killing creatures:
	This is a flying tank 
	with the handling of a Porsche 
	and the beauty of a shark.
War poems work best for me when the writer takes us into the reality of everyday experience for the soldiers and civilians. Angela Morkos does this in LISTENING TO J.S. BACH ON MY WALKMAN, where plugging in the headphones seems to help distance the war scene into a kind of documentary: A Jewish mother and child's remains
	Are soaped from the roadside by 
	A cheese-stall in an Israeli market 
	By mourners, for a "decent" burial — 
	Only J.S. Bach's music makes sense 
	In all this carnage — I ache for it.
The narrative poems of Jan Oskar Hansen weave a fiction around the characters who could be based on reality, like Imar in SACRIFICIAL LAMBS:
	Imar, the Turkish driver drove his truck through Iraq, 
	promises of riches a pay five times more than usual, 
	at last he could afford to build his wife a decent  house.
Imar is taken hostage and requests for the army to withdraw are
	met with contemptuous silence
	and a shoulder shrug.
Hansen concludes
	Preposterous, to think
	that anyone would stop the war because of a truck driver.
The story of Imar reminds me of Brian Turner's poem THE AL HARISHMA WEAPONS MARKET, which is in the HERE BULLET collection (Alice James Books, 2005) In this poem we hear about the weapons dealer Akbar:
 
	Black marketeer or insurgent — 
	an American death puts food on the table, 
	more cash than most men earn in a year.
Turner served in the US army in Iraq and has been hailed as our present day equivalent of the poets from World War I and II. In HERE BULLET he takes the reader through the realities of the conflict and we need to follow him to the end of the journey to realise his final message is anti-war as he says of two of his dead soldiers
the purple heart they will both be given for this is an award no one wants
. He concludes with poems showing that the experience has been worthless:
	Has this year made me a better lover? 
	Will I understand something of hardship, 
	of loss, will a lover sense this 
	in my kiss or touch? What do I know 
	of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have 
	to say of the dead — that it was worth  it, 
	that any of it made sense?
Turner trusts the reader's intelligence and lets the reader ask questions when left with the haunting memory of the poems, which to my mind is the best way for a war poem to work.

reviewer: Adele Ward.