The places of no return

"There are many dead in the brutish desert," wrote Hamish Henderson in Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica.

"There were our own, there were the others... that we should not disfigure ourselves/with the villainy of hatred; and seeing that all/have gone down like curs into anonymous silence... why should I not sing them, the dead, the innocent?"

Brian Turner served for seven years in the US army, first in Bosnia and then in Iraq, where he was an infantry team leader with the Third Stryker Brigade. His first book of poems, Here, Bullet (Bloodaxe Books, £8.95) is a combatant's diary in verse, notes in the margins of the inferno.

In places, it is like a documentary film, shot with a hand-held camera. It is poetry of personal witness - direct and brutal, full of the grisly details of the mortuary and the body bag.

Turner writes about a charnel wilderness where only the vultures are safe. "Let them witness every plume/of smoke, every fallen soldier/every woman's last kiss/for the ones they love/and even me when the time comes, let the vultures feed on me/let them tear me apart."

His poetry has been praised for its "detachment," because it appears not to take sides. But, though the book barely addresses the political context of the carnage, the determination to see both sides is itself a political statement.

Like Henderson, Turner insists on the democracy of death, on the "innocence" of insurgents, police, soldiers and civilians, of the dead, the maimed and the bereaved. "Today, in Baghdad, a bomb/kills 47 and wounds over 100/leaving a crater 10 feet deep. The stunned/gather body parts from the roadway/to collect in cardboard boxes/which will not be taped and shipped/to the White House lawn."

Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson are best known for their Writers Take Sides series of books about the wars in Vietnam, the Falklands and, most recently, Iraq. They have also published a series of important studies of poets from the world wars, including Richard Aldington, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg and Alan Lewis.

Just out from Cecil Woolf Publishers are two splendid surveys of the poetry written by ordinary soldiers - Phil Caradice's People's Poetry of World War One and John Press's Trench Songs of the First World War.

It is good to see the anonymous authors of Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire and When This Bloody War is Over included in such a strong series.

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in Galilee in 1931. When his village was destroyed during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, he fled to Lebanon. A year later, he settled in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since.

So What: New and Selected Poems 1971-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, £12) is a kind of sustained lament for the country that is no longer his, for the nakba, the "great catastrophe" of 1948.

He repeatedly returns in imagination and memory to the village - it is now a Jewish moshav - to which he cannot return. "Where are the bleating lambs/and pomegranates of evening?" he asks. "The wedding/parties of swallows/the rites and feasts of the olives... where are the fields we played/our games of hide-and-seek in... the kite descending on chicks/from the heaven's heights."

Taha Muhammad Ali is a major poet of dispossession, migration, exile and his constant companion, sadness. "What confuses me is/that you are bigger than my day/greater than my past/and larger than my tomorrow."

Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1942 in Galilee. His family fled to Lebanon in 1948 when the Israeli army destroyed their village. From 1970 to 1996, he lived in Moscow, Cairo, Beirut and Paris, before settling in Ramallah. He was a member of the PLO Executive Council and, with Edward Said, wrote the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence.

The Butterfly's Burden (Bloodaxe, £12) collects some of his most recent work, including the extraordinary sequence A State of Siege, about the second intifada and The Stranger's Bed, a long love poem of exile, beautiful and painful as anything by Aragon, Hikmet or Neruda.

Darwish is interested in the place where "I" becomes "we," the private and public responsibilities of poetry.

These are not contradictions in his work, but the source of his greatness and his popularity. When he writes a stanza about the houses that he has lived in, he is also writing about the houses that he has been forced to leave - the Arabic word for "stanza" is "bayt," which also means house or home.

But even Darwish has the strength and the patience to imagine that Another Day Will Come, when "Water will flow from the rock's bosom/No dust, no drought, no defeat/And a dove will sleep in the afternoon in an abandoned/combat tank if it doesn't find a small nest/in the lovers' bed."

The War Poets are available at £6 each from Cecil Woolf Publishers, 1 Mornington Place, London NW1 7RP.