Shaped by his time spent serving in Iraq, American soldier Brian Turner's first collection, Here, Bullet, depicted combat with a mixture of bleak reality and disturbing surrealism. His second, Phantom Noise, also bristles with war's devastations, but here conflict appears in flashbacks set against the backdrop of the poet's Californian home. Turner's is a world where even a visit to the local hardware shop opens on to artillery fire: a spilled "50 pound box of double headed nails" that pour on to the floor "constant as the shells / falling south of Baghdad". The poems often read as an attempt to explain, understand and come to terms with the terrible things soldiers witness and are party to: the language sparse and precise, the tone questing and urgent. Yet the writing is rarely prescriptive, leaving interpretation open. Almost miraculously, there is also much sensitivity: "Al-A'imma Bridge" is a nightmarish account of the 2005 Tigris river disaster, yet finds "flowers that may light the darkness" to commemorate those who lost their lives. Turner's resilient, humane poems remind us of war's impact but also provoke and question.