Guerrilla Country – My New Poetry Collection

Guerrilla Country – my new poetry collection – out today

I’m very happy to say that my third poetry collection Guerrilla Country is published today, and can be purchased from the publishers Flight of the Dragonfly Press. The poems explore the relationship between peace, conflict and place. The book is dedicated to current and past staff and collaborators of peacebuilding organisation International Alert, whose Executive Director Nic Hailey has kindly written an introduction.

The book’s stunning cover is based on a photograph taken by Jonathan Banks, who kindly allowed us to use the picture, at the Peace and Culture Festival organised by International Alert in Liberia in 2008, celebrating Unity in Diversity as part of Liberia’s post-conflict recovery.

I worked for International Alert for more than a decade, and other NGOs before that. Guerrilla Country is partly my personal response to witnessing and trying to understand how conflict evolves into peace and how this process can be helped; as well as how situations so often revert or degenerate into violence. The poems reflect on events in almost 40 different contexts, past and present, from Texas to Rwanda, via Afghanistan, Amristar, Belfast, Ukraine, Runnymede and Peterloo. I’m hoping the poems will be of interest, not just to the usual poetry audience, but also those involved in peacebuilding.

Here’s a small taste:

The King's Peace

To keep his peace, our king built temples,
courts and palaces, and scarred
the land he'd won, with ditches, ports
and roads; determined how we die;
and blessed us with his enmities.

To teach us irony, he named
his cousins lords and justices.
Apprised of God's mistake by priests
and clerks, on pain of punishment
he made us speak a single tongue.

His word was written, maps were drawn.
But laws and maps and roadways lengthened
distances, and when he sailed,
he left no instrument through which
to see, but a kaleidoscope.

We turn and turn its wheels, but cannot
make the fractured picture whole.

Choosing the score

They sought a music to 
replace D major,
kettledrums and brass;
a music ending on
a quiet, sustained
C major tutti chord.

But the scores they chose
were beyond their grasp

or opened a hidden door.

Comments on the book by other poets

Raine Geoghegan

These are stirring poems with strong themes of war, hardship, freedom and renewal. Vernon writes from the perspective of both witness and peacebuilder. He illustrates the many complexities of war and conflict and through this lens the reader begins to glimpse both the harshness of war but also the beauty of peace. His observations are clear, concise and they take us on a road which he has clearly travelled. The poet and the peacebuilder are present in each poem. From the powerful imagery in The AK47 – my perfect design, ‘I run towards the gunfire, but/ I have no gun to love and hold’, to the poignant words in Aminata’s song, ‘My brothers, we challenge you now/ to gather your cousins and friends/ know how to stand your ground/ and when and how to bend.’ This is a brilliant collection. Go buy a copy.

Jack Caradoc

Guerilla Country is a far-reaching book in scope and complexity. A record, a journal of humanity in conflict. Vernon’s poetically sharp eye presents the terrible actualities both historically and in the political present, inviting us to consider often horror in our world but also the vital need for hope in the face of it. The light of poetry illuminating the darkest places as it should. Powerful words.

Susan Wicks

Guerrilla Country is a courageous book, with poems inspired by a wide geography of contemporary and historical battles – all the braver for its structure, which juxtaposes distant unnamed scenarios of conflict with some of the landscapes of deprivation that must have made them inevitable. We glimpse the forms and colours of medieval pageantry, and its aftermath. We see the patterns Kitchener left in the sand at Khartoum. And we hear Aminata’s song of stolen herds and hunger in a home with ‘no okra sauce’. Follow the clues to find yourself in a place of huge empathy, where war may be the shared language but measured thought and humanity still prevail.  

Jess Mookherjee

The reader of Phil Vernon’s carefully wrought poems of witness in Guerrilla Country will meet displaced people and danger, and will run into gunfire. And yet nature persists, and through the passage of time and verse we also meet a kind of peace.