WAR POET.(Brian Turner, "Here, Bullet" poetry collection)

William Butler Yeats had strong opinions about the poets of the First World War: Rupert Brooke, he said, was "the handsomest young man in England"; Wilfred Owen's stuff was "all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick." It is interesting to imagine how he would have sized up Brian Turner, a thirty-eight-year-old former Army sergeant from Fresno, California, and the author of a book of poems about a year he spent deployed in Iraq. Turner describes himself as five feet nine and a hundred and eighty pounds, with short but unbuzzed hair and a growing-out goatee: "Not the best-looking mug in the world, but I do what I can with it." His debut collection, "Here, Bullet," is more sandy than muddy, has plenty of blood (as well as "Grease guns, pistols, RPGs" and "all the fucks and goddamns / and Jesus Christs of the wounded"), and offers its share of sweetness, in the form of date palms, chai tea, and off-hours prostitutes observed through the lenses of high-powered binoculars. In a poem called "R&R," he conjures a faraway place "where the beer is so cold it sweats in your hand, / cool as her kissing you with crushed ice, / her tongue wet with blackberry and melon."

"Here, Bullet" won this year's Beatrice Hawley Award from a cooperative poetry press in Maine called Alice James Books (previous winners have included manuscripts with titles like "Self and Simulacra," "Camera Lyrica," and "Utopic"), and came out last week. On the acknowledgments page, Turner thanks Fi, Jax, Bosch, Liu, Noodles, Zoo, Bodiggidy, Shaft, and Nurse Betty. Nurse Betty is a male medic, and Bodiggidy is Specialist Bogans--"a really good guy."

Turner--also known as Sergeant T. or "the professor"--was a team leader in the first Stryker brigade to be sent into the combat zone, and was stationed, for much of 2004, near Mosul. He wrote his poems secretly. People in the Army knew that he had a master's degree, but no one ever asked him what it was for--it was an M.F.A. in poetry, from the University of Oregon--and he saw no reason to advertise it. Noncommissioned officers, he says, are the "backbone of the Army," and "it's hard to be hard-nosed if you're writing poetry." He didn't want his underlings to ...