RaveThe New RepublicThe Yellow Birds is a rich chronicle of mendacity: men lie to each other and to themselves; ‘memory’ itself, the narrator observes, is half imagined … The Yellow Birds...achieves its most surprising and authentically obscene moments in a different register altogether. The book revives the World War I tradition that the late Paul Fussell called ‘war pastoral,’ a mode practiced by Owen’s soldier-poet contemporaries (Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden, among others), who exposed the old lie by transplanting the pastoral imagery of the English poetic tradition to the wasted soil of the trenches … Powers’s brutal lyricism feels fresh because it recalls a mode so decisively eclipsed by the high-octane hyperrealism of so much contemporary writing about war. It is this tenacious lyric voice that sets his novel, heavy though it is with war’s silencing pain and shame, apart.
