The Pleasure of Firing Back
The Pleasure of Firing Back
by Graham Buchan (Lapwing Publications, 10.00 Sterling)
“What is this gravity, this collective amnesia,/these island economies, stupid/and temporary, these knots of violent biology?”
Maybe it was the heat, but I thought about violence a lot this past summer. Please do not be concerned, I am not contemplating violence myself; well, at least not beyond what is normal for most folks driving in Seattle these days. No, I am thinking about all of the violent entertainment I have consumed since childhood, from Natural Born Killers to Narcos. I am also thinking about all of the wars my country has waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and the carnage currently inflicted daily by Russia in Ukraine. In Graham Buchan’s new book, The Pleasure of Firing Back, I found more opportunities to reflect on our human urge to destroy each other.
Much of the book is concerned with the wars of the Twentieth Century. A good example of this is “Imbros”, a stream-of-consciousness prose poem about a battle on that Greek island. This piece is filled with chaos and confusion as hell breaks out all around the narrator. But there is heaven here as well, at least that is what the narrator is trying to escape to, “will there be a girl in Egypt? The shining, silver sea.”
Indeed, the book itself seems to be balanced this way between different hells and heavens. The depictions of violence are often graphic. To his credit, Buchan does not shy away from the horrible details of war. The collection includes stories about concentration camps, gulags, revolutions, battles, bombings, invasions, and other terrors. But through it all the poet displays an empathy for the people caught up in conflicts, such as the veteran in his poem, “The Stories That Don’t Get Told”. He also uses contemplative and vivid lines, “I did not dwell in the dungeons of the mad./Death is hidden in clocks./Clocks, like sleep, contain the idea of death.”
“The Torturer and his Love for Beethoven” is a piece written from the perspective of the torturer himself. It reminded me of Lautreamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, and even Hannah Arendt’s book on Eichmann, The Banality of Evil. In the beginning, the torturer brags about the efficient methods he uses to break his prisoners. He also discusses an upcoming family vacation, the office politics of his job, and his fascination with classical music. This is a brilliant way of both partly humanizing an otherwise monstrous character and revealing how commonplace cruelty can become. Later on, we are treated to the twists that make for a compelling narrative.
Beyond “The Torturer and his Love for Beethoven”, musical references can be found throughout The Pleasure of Firing Back, from Handel to Hendrix. The rapture of music is one example of a heaven that balances out the myriad hells that Buchan describes. There are other light moments in this collection as well, sometimes in formal poems consisting of rhyme and meter. I admire Buchan’s range, to go from gory stream-of-consciousness free verse to an elevated sonnet about the Normans in the same collection is quite a feat.
Many of these poems are concerned with the passage of time, especially for men. Violence, and all the emotions wrapped up in it, seem to connect the generations, “the birds of shame and memory/explode from the hedge—/the immaculately square-trimmed hedge.” Perhaps by recognizing the true costs of past and present conflicts we can finally move beyond this shame. For me at least, this is something worth thinking about.
Benjamin Schmitt
Benjamin Schmitt is the author of four books, most recently The Saints of Capitalism and Soundtrack to a Fleeting Masculinity. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sojourners, Antioch Review, The Good Men Project, Hobart, Columbia Review, Spillway, and elsewhere. A co-founder of Pacifica Writers’ Workshop, he has also written articles for The Seattle Times and At The Inkwell. He lives in Seattle with his wife and children.