Our conception of "war poetry" is still determined largely by what we know of poetry written during and about the 1914-18 war. Its originality in all senses, its dominance within the school curriculum, its unfading power to move and horrify: these all mean that for a majority of readers, war poetry that isn't about blood, mud and hand-to-hand combat, and that doesn't prove what Owen famously called "the pity of war", either doesn't qualify as war poetry at all, or is an inferior version. Hence the comparative neglect of major second world war poets such as Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis. Hence the tendency to see poems (and prose) about more recent conflicts as being good or less good depending on how they conform to the witnessings of a century ago.
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Yellow Birds, by the Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers, did pretty well in this respect; despite the unevenness of its style and effects, it won the Guardian first book award among other prestigious prizes. Now comes a collection of poems, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, which deals with experience similar to that covered in the novel: graphic battle scenes and the attempt to feel "at home" in the aftermath of the conflict. Its lyrics describe a sparsely populated mental landscape and project a jittery sensibility that is hungry for consolation yet removed from most comforts; they are written in choppy free verse that is at once wired and conversational (sometimes to a fault); the whole effort is impressive in its sincerity and virtually unimpeachable in its distress.
The conflict-memories provide the most striking scenes in the book. But the most powerful are those less spectacular episodes in which Powers struggles to make sense of his war experience in places far-removed from the frontline. Here the word "means" repeats like a tic – "what I mean"; "I mean it"; "I mean exactly that"; "I mean the idea" appear in just the first few pages. The effect is to show a mind knowing what is involved in an act of understanding something, yet also knowing how easily understanding can fail.
And all the more so because words – which are the usually reliable means of expressing comprehension or the lack of it – become unstable in such circumstances. Sometimes they are "devices", as explosive in their way as IEDs. At others they are "cruel signifiers" that appear to offer a reprieve, but in fact become the pre‑eminent means to relive bad memories.
This is the problem Powers returns to again and again through all four sections of his collection. His experience of the war made battle unreal ("I tell her," he says in the title poem, "how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand / that war is just us / making little pieces of metal / pass through each other"), and his experience of the subsequent peace is equally disrupted:
I can't remember
how to be alive. It has begun
to rain so hard I fear I'll drown.
I guess we ought to
take these pennies off our eyes,
strike into them new likenesses;
toss them with new wishes
into whatever water can be found.
In the midst of such uncertainty, it's not surprising to find Powers considering the earth itself as a sort of sanctuary: poets of all wars have done the same thing. But the soil that offers cover and comfort ("I / have tried to become earth / many times, / to be lower than earth"; "This was I taught / to pray – root your knees in the earth") offers a darker promise as well. "Every ground must break / along the fault / that it is given", Powers says in "Valentine with Flat Effect". What he means is: war makes Mother Earth unreliable. She is a grave as well as protection.
These paradoxes, which have an interesting connection with the natural reversals we find in Owen and other poets of the first world war, produce many of the most touching moments in Powers' collection. And so do his references to his parents, his mother especially, who also triggered some of the strongest passages in Yellow Birds. They console him, they lift him from his present to a more innocent prewar time, yet they have their own way of disappointing him. Like the ground beneath his feet, they can only do so much before the ironies and impossibilities that are war's legacy kick in again.
Putting it like this makes Letters Composed During a Lull in the Fighting seem like a record of passive suffering. Abject suffering, perhaps. But while the material of the collection is almost entirely to do with disjunction and trauma, the governing mood is determined, if not actually feisty. It describes "the buried outline of a life" that is (formally as well as humanly) trying to establish a clearer profile. It finds itself "almost reaching grief" in a way that might heal it, and is never completely overwhelmed by the disappointment of "not quite getting there".
• The Customs House by Andrew Motion is published by Faber.