"The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers ****

• National Book Award Finalist
• US author
• Originally published 2012
• Epigraphs:
• "A yellow bird, With a yellow bill, Was perched upon, My windowsill..........I lured him in, With a piece of bread, And then I smashed, His fucking head....."....Traditional U.S. Army Marching Cadence
• "To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past, is a mercifull provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil dayes, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions.".....Sir Thomas Browne
• Quotes:
• p.11...."We only pay attention to rare things, and death was not rare."
• p.24....."It was hard to believe that we'd be OK and that we'd fought well.  But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed."
• p.31..."At some point along the way I stopped believing in significance.  Order became an accident of observation."
• p.33...."He was harsh, but fair, and there was a kind of evolutionary beauty in his competence."....Sergeant Sterling
• p.35...."Eventually I had to learn that freedom is not the same thing as the absence of accountability."
• p.37....."We'd had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams.  So we'd come here, where life needed no elaboration and others would tell us who to be."
• p.91....."I thought of my grandfather's war.  How they had destinations and purpose."...in contrast to his war
• p.93....."It's like a car accident.  You know?  That instant between knowing that it's gonna happen and actually slamming into the other car.  Feels pretty helpless actually, like you've been riding along same as always, then it's there staring you in the face and you don't have the power to do shit about it.  And know it.  Death, or whatever, it's either coming or it's not."......the sensation when moving into battle
• p.99....."Such small arrangements make a life, and though it's hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war.....".
• p.100...."...if God had looked on us during that flight back home we might have seemed like fabric ready to be thrown, in surrendered blankness of our sleep, over the furniture of a thousand empty houses."......so very sad
• p.115...."It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability."..........the moment before engaging the enemy to fight over a patch of land which was fought over almost annually
• p.165....."He wanted to have one memory he'd made of his own volition to balance out the shattered remnants of everything he hadn't asked for."......Murph watching the pretty medic at work, grieving, and then in death
• p.225....."It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said.  It wasn't much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow."...after conversation between Bartle and Murph's mother at the prison
• Notes:
• the story of Murph's father bringing home canaries from the mine to set them free, and then they returned at night to their cage........foreshadowing, metaphor of a mournful life

• Review:  One of the epigraphs for this book seems to summarize it best with the metaphor of an innocent yellow bird being brutally destroyed by a human.  Certainly, Murph, experienced the same before he died, a death chosen rather than survival.  Yet perhaps the worse destruction is experienced by his surviving buddy, Bartle.  It did not surprise me to read that the author, Kevin Powers, was a Michener Fellow in Poetry in graduate school.  Powers' prose is absolutely beautiful, creating a stark contrast with the anything but beautiful plot.  This novel is heartrending! A very impressive debut.  In many ways this book earns five stars by my criteria.  The use of language and characters are stellar.  However, there is something about the rhythm of the story that fell a bit short.  So, 4 stars, and a desire to see more from this author in the future.