Kevin Powers' Yellow Birds

Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds is a remarkable novel. His prose is meditative, lucid and evocative. As a word-junkie, I love his writing. I have read only a few war novels, but they cover a broad gamut: Remarque's psychological classic All Quiet on the Western Front, the poet Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, and the big, dramatic Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks. The Yellow Birds is written by another poet, Powers was the Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University Texas at Austin. Like Remarque, Powers is a combat veteran. He enlisted in the Army at the age of seventeen, and spent two years in Iraq as a machine gunner.

While Powers is a poet, his writing is not poetic in the way Ondaatje's novels are. His prose has a kind of mindfulness, and creates a visceral presence. The book is largely the first-person emotional journey of John Bartle, a young soldier in combat in Iraq in 2004. Powers evokes clearly and without drama, the emotions of war, many of them not very heroic: fear, relief, mental and physical exhaustion. Bartle's reflections on fear are startlingly clear and present. The story includes very little combat "action", the book's action is mainly interior.

I hesitate to mention that this is a "first novel", because those words often imply some limitation or flaw. On the contrary, this is a very accomplished novel, first or otherwise.