The Yellow Birds By Kevin Powers Summary
“THE YELLOW BIRDS,” BY KEVIN POWERS
REVIEWED BY CALEB CAGE
November 29th, 2012
The innocuous title of Kevin Powers’ debut novel The Yellow Birds is a reference to a military marching cadence. In its lyrics, as anyone who served in the military in recent decades might know, a peaceful bird is lured into a room and wantonly killed. The cadence is off-putting because of its unusual mixture of poetry, vulgarity, and violence, and because there is no apparent explanation for the acts it describes. Powers’ novel, which is equally poetic, vulgar, and violent, begins to make sense of the obscure cadence it references for the first time.
The Yellow Birds is about Murph and Bartle, two young privates going off to war in Iraq. Murph is young, 18, from West Virginia, and new to the Army. Bartle …show more content…
Powers maximizes his control over these rhythms, over his story and how and when he wants his reader to hear it, through his poetic, lyrical style. He selects wisely from a literary inventory well beyond his years and develops his themes through images, sometimes fresh, sometimes recurring, that are perfect for what he is trying to convey. His images suggest a pursuit of knowledge of God, of higher meaning, of connection with nature, and of his war’s natural overlap with his understanding of all of these pursuits. And through his exploration, readers are treated to remarkable passages like this:
When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn’t been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the ruddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid. I smelled copper and cheep wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child’s pull-tab book.
Kevin Powers
Kevin
REVIEWED BY CALEB CAGE
November 29th, 2012
The innocuous title of Kevin Powers’ debut novel The Yellow Birds is a reference to a military marching cadence. In its lyrics, as anyone who served in the military in recent decades might know, a peaceful bird is lured into a room and wantonly killed. The cadence is off-putting because of its unusual mixture of poetry, vulgarity, and violence, and because there is no apparent explanation for the acts it describes. Powers’ novel, which is equally poetic, vulgar, and violent, begins to make sense of the obscure cadence it references for the first time.
The Yellow Birds is about Murph and Bartle, two young privates going off to war in Iraq. Murph is young, 18, from West Virginia, and new to the Army. Bartle …show more content…
Powers maximizes his control over these rhythms, over his story and how and when he wants his reader to hear it, through his poetic, lyrical style. He selects wisely from a literary inventory well beyond his years and develops his themes through images, sometimes fresh, sometimes recurring, that are perfect for what he is trying to convey. His images suggest a pursuit of knowledge of God, of higher meaning, of connection with nature, and of his war’s natural overlap with his understanding of all of these pursuits. And through his exploration, readers are treated to remarkable passages like this:
When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn’t been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the ruddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid. I smelled copper and cheep wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child’s pull-tab book.
Kevin Powers
Kevin