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Shortlisted for the 2014 TS Eliot Prize
Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Poetry Book Society Choice
In this remarkable debut poetry collection, National Book Award finalist and Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers creates a startling, 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 honesty and insight, these poems strive to make sense of war and its echoes through human experience.
Just as THE YELLOW BIRDS was hailed as the ‘first literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war,’ (Los Angeles Times) this collection will prove to be a powerful, enduring classic.
Shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best First Collection
Poetry Book Society Choice
In this remarkable debut poetry collection, National Book Award finalist and Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers creates a startling, 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 honesty and insight, these poems strive to make sense of war and its echoes through human experience.
Just as THE YELLOW BIRDS was hailed as the ‘first literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war,’ (Los Angeles Times) this collection will prove to be a powerful, enduring classic.
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Reviews
Extraordinary...Brilliantly observed and deeply affecting.
Powers is a poet first, so THE YELLOW BIRDS is spare, incredibly precise, unimproveable.
Kevin Powers has produced a masterpiece of war literature and a classic.
Like the best war poets, Kevin Powers' real subject is not the battle for land or governance, but the battle for one man's soul. In dramatising that inner conflict, he achieves a poetry both urgent and universal.
There is a plain-speaking, backyard tone to these poems, its ancestry stretching all the way back to such writers as Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving... it is probably advisable to dip into this piecemeal rather than attempt to absorb its brutal richesse in one sitting... To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, perhaps every poet should think meanly of himself for not producing a debut collection quite as powerful as this one.
A powerful and very affecting collection.