About book Letter Composed During A Lull In The Fighting: Poems (2014)
I feel bad for only liking the poems about war and suffering and for finding all his more individualistic and personal poems... predictable? I don't know. I haven't read a poetry book in a long time. There are some strong poems here and some I didn't find all that interesting. Overall, it was good and I might suggest it to someone interested in war stories, but I would definitely tell them to skip the last two sections. You won't be missing that much. Because of the way he's been sold (as a "war writer"), I find it hard to assess Kevin Powers. He is certainly talented, someone to follow. I read "The Yellow Birds" and found it uneven, at its best when it was poetic, at it's worst when it tried to tie ends together and become prose. I thought I would love a collection of his poems. Now that I have that collection and have read it, I am less in love. The collection, like the novel, is uneven. Roughly divided into two war sections and two civilian sections, I found myself looking for the heart and the man who wrote it all. I didn't always find him. The war poems, at times, seemed a little too sensational. The civilian poems seemed a little too ruminative and perhaps prosaic. I did spend more time in this section. This is the place where Powers resides most. I am excited to see him emerge, not just as a war writer, but as a great American writer.
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Breathtaking. His silences create the space in your mind where your witness your own silence.
—grays
Like Remarque, O'Brien, and Bly, Kevin Powers speaks to war in an eloquent way.
—tamz
Improvised Explosive Device is my favorite poem in this collection.
—Jean
