War Reporter
Paul Watson won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1993 photograph of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu; he has since reported from the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria . . . Deriving from correspondence between poet and war reporter and their eventual meeting on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, and from transcripts and Watson’s own memoir, these poems bear unsparing witness to the incalculable damage inflicted by contemporary warfare.
War Reporter was awarded the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and was shortlisted for the Forward Foundation's Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection.
REVIEWS
“A masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling, and a completely sui generis addition not just to writing about war but to contemporary poetry.”
―Patrick McGuinness, The Guardian
“An incredible achievement. Anyone who cares about how we go to war—and how we return—must read it."
―William J. Dobson, Slate (Best Books of 2013)
“In this gut-wrenching, hardboiled collection, poet and playwright O’Brien focuses on Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist and war correspondent Paul Watson, a witness to atrocities and violence in Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Asia . . . The language of the poems―most of which are persona poems written in the myriad of voices that Watson has encountered in his travels―is spare, adopting a journalistic tone seemingly as a means to cope with what is witnessed. In this context, war is the hell through which Watson, a kind of Virgil figure, leads the poet. ‘I see / it like a labyrinth,’ the photographer tells the poet, ‘If you get the truth/ you get out. But you don’t, it just gets worse / you get more lost.’ One gets the sense that Watson has been scarred not only by what he has seen, but by his own paradoxical role as a journalist who effectively profits from scenes of bedlam and horror, and who is both attracted to and repelled by them. ‘This is what / I've turned into,’ Watson tells O’Brien in the final poem, “a mercenary and / a desperate one at that.’”
“The subject of this book is war and the pity of war―distilled into very powerful poems that are all the more affecting thanks to their clever and restraining use of personae. At once direct and detached, they make the whole notion of ‘response’ as much a focus of their attention as the facts of conflict.”
―Andrew Motion, UK Poet Laureate (1999-2009)
“I commend this work for its great originality, courage and humanity.”
―Fergal Keane
“As Wallace Stevens once wrote, poetry has to ‘think about war / And it has to find what will suffice.’ Dan O’Brien knows this in his bones. He has dug into American history, into our perpetual war, and found sufficient words―words that meet the people of his time with language adequate to their experience. I can’t speak highly enough of these poems. The book is superb, subtle, memorable, and of a piece. It sings and cries. It consoles. It is a gift to readers of poetry.”
―Jay Parini
“Dan O’Brien has discovered the poetry in the most harrowing of war stories, and made music of the ways in which we share in each other’s guilts, doubts, and triumphs. Meanwhile, the poet’s identity bleeds into that of war reporter, photographer and reader. This is a tragic book about the human comedy.”
―Mary Jo Salter
“War Reporter is an edgy, heartbreaking amalgam of memoir, dramatic monologue and poetic intensity, in which war reporter Paul Watson’s complex personal struggles are seen against the backdrop of political violence.”
―Alan Shapiro
“Dan O’Brien’s book is big, brave, important and challenging.”
―Martyn Crucefix, Poetry London
“The search for answers and for truth knocks on every page—’A rule / that’s always served me well: When your knock comes, / don’t answer’—and yet O’Brien, united with Watson, attempts to finally open the door that has been closed entirely too long.”
―Kelly Sylvester, NewPages
“This narrative collection reads like recent historical drama . . . The horrors and ramifications of war are laid out throughout with no suggestion of hiding an ounce of truth . . . War Reporter is a provocative examination of a life spent recording the ugly facets of a world filled with the unnecessary annihilation of human beings. O’Brien’s bold concept of using the literal in place of metaphor, without requiring regular illusory imagery, is a literary revelation that continues to transport the reader into the world of Paul Watson, with brutal honesty, long after you turn the final page.”
―Robert Harper, Bare Fiction
“This is a complex collection. As Watson is haunted, so too is O’Brien and the affinity between them suggests that, to O’Brien, Watson is more than mere subject matter. Something in Watson resonates for O’Brien and, over the years, perhaps he is haunted by him . . . [These] poems are fresh and loaded with eye-witness testimony. All of this adds up to the most visceral poems that you are likely to read. War Reporter offers the reader a journey into the heart of darkness.”
―John Field, Poor Rude Lines
“The poems are stylistically colloquial; the to-some-degree-fictionalised Watson tells his anecdotes casually, and horrors slide up unanticipated amidst his everyday routines, his love life, the demands of his Editor. This combination of memoir and dramatic monologue frames the poems as profoundly human: but whether ‘human’ is at heart a terrible beast, or has grounds for a shaky hope, is undecided. There is no real ‘making beautiful’ of either of these experiences―the loss of a child, the horror of war―perhaps there is only the honesty to look hard, to face them.”
―Anna McKerrow, Booktrust
“O’Brien has crafted a debut collection that is as unforgettable as it is important.”
―John Saad, Birmingham Poetry Review
“For all of their disturbing subject matter, O’Brien’s poems find a hard lyricism of their own, a staccato rhythm that beats much like the gunfire and violence that pervade the collection’s landscapes. What emerges from the rubble, the aftermath, is a book not only powerfully affecting, heartbreaking and elegiac, but profoundly beautiful.”
―Dean Julius, storySouth
“A rare book . . . A lifetime is made from the many small acts created and committed. War Reporter is a lifetime and more. Words may fail, but Dan O’Brien’s molding of them do not.”
―Vicki Hudson, San Francisco Book Review
FEATURES
“Striking Somali war photo inspires new works in curious creative partnership” by Marsha Lederman in The Globe and Mail
“The War Within” by Lawrence Goodman in Brown Alumni Magazine
“The haunting: Dan O'Brien on how he came to write 'docu-poetry' about war” by Greg Freeman in Write Out Loud
INTERVIEWS
“The Poet Finds His Voice Through the War Reporter: Q&A With Dan O’Brien” in ZYZZYVA
“Shock, Awe, Truth, and the Horribly Beautiful: John Barton In Conversation with Dan O'Brien and Paul Watson” in The Malahat Review
Interview in Fjords Review
“War poet Dan O'Brien: 'I want to move the reader. Empathy is the goal'” in Write Out Loud
EXCERPTS
“"The War Reporter Paul Watson Imagines His Father" read by Dan O’Brien for The World This Weekend on BBC 4
“The War Reporter Paul Watson Lost His Camera” at The Poetry Society
“The War Reporter Paul Watson on Censorship” in The Sunday Times
“The War Reporter Paul Watson and the Son of the Tortured” in Missouri Review
“The War Reporter Paul Watson Gives the Poet Some Advice” in Missouri Review
Excerpt in And Other Poems