“Bullets into Bells” edited by Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague and Dean Rader

Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Captain Mark Kelly write in the foreword of “Bullets into Bells,” …” people in public service do not begin their careers thinking that gun violence prevention would be their life’s work.” Neither do poets, as in the case of one of the collection’s editors, Brian Clements. Then comes a day that starts out ordinary and ends having determined that no day forward will ever be the same.

For the congresswoman, that typical day included a constituent meeting in a supermarket parking lot. Clements’  usual day began with a customary goodbye to his wife Abbey, who headed off to her classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Before the sun set, gunfire shattered the taken-for-granted normalcy of both of those days — and far too many lives. In the Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, Giffords and eighteen others were shot when a lone gunman drew a pistol and shot her in the head before proceeding to fire on others. Six people died, including a federal court judge and a nine-year-old girl. In Connecticut, Clements’ wife had survived the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. His poem —  22 — traces the murderer’s steps.

 … Rather than turn right,

toward my wife’s classroom where she pulled

two kids into her room from the hallway,

he turned to the left, murdered twenty children

and six adults … 

Clements’ poem ends, “After that, a lot of other things happened, / but it doesn’t really matter what.”

“Bullets into Bells” brings together poems by dozens of well-known poets, including Billy Collins, Patricia Smith and Yusef Komunyakaa. Each poem is followed by a response from a gun violence prevention activist, political figure, survivor, or concerned individual. These include commentary by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams, Senator Christopher Murphy, survivors of the Columbine, Sandy Hook, Charleston Emmanuel AME, and Virginia Tech shootings, and the grieving mothers of two teenagers — Tamir Rice and Jordan Davis — who were shot to death.

Poet Brian Clements at a “Bullets into Bells” reading.

Clements says the aim of the collection is that “poets, survivors, families and friends of victims, activists, political figures, researchers, and audiences will come together to share and discuss their common ground.”

Award-winning writer Colum McCann quotes Shakespeare in the book’s introduction, asking,  “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?” What an apt question for the mission to capture brutal gun violence in poetry. McCann goes on to remind us that the nobility of poetry, according to Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stevens, “is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.”

A review in the literary journal Ploughshares clarifies further.”Instead of romanticizing suffering, particularly a kind that disproportionately affects marginalized groups, the book’s contributors work to “untangle” and communicate what Colum McCann describes in his introduction as ‘the intricate nuances of that suffering.'”

The New York Times called “Bullets into Bells” new and noteworthy when it was published just over a year ago. A supplementary Bullets into Bells website features new original poems, commentary, essays, and more in an attempt to continue the conversation about gun violence that speaks directly to the heart.