Few birds are as small and as loud as a wren, and that double nature is the quiet engine of Dave Bonta's "Contention." The poem opens by asking, or perhaps telling, us to be "present as a wren": alert, compact, "ear to the scandal of another / goddamn day." The wren is a creature of attention, but it is also a bird with a famously big voice, and the poem never lets us forget that listening and noise are close relatives.
The first stanza is a single sentence fragment with no punctuation, and that gives it a useful slipperiness. Is the speaker describing himself as present, or giving himself an instruction? Is it the wren or the speaker whose ear is turned to the scandal? The missing verb and the lack of capitals and commas let all these readings sit together. The word "scandal" is a shrewd choice. It suggests gossip and headlines, the daily churn of bad news, and yet it is something the ear is pressed against, as if the speaker cannot help eavesdropping on the world's wrongdoing. Then comes the curse. "Another / goddamn day" arrives after a line break that stretches "another" into a sigh, and the stanza ends on its shortest line, two heavy stresses falling like a door shutting. After the delicate image of the wren, the bluntness is funny and tired at once. Judging by the language, the speaker is worn out by the news but still listening.
The second stanza turns from the bird to a book. "o my book of war" has a mock-grand apostrophe, the old-fashioned lowercase "o" addressed to something that deserves no such tenderness. The poem does not say what this book is, and it is more interesting left open. It might be a history, a news feed, a private notebook, or all the accumulated writing about conflict that a reader carries around. What matters is the verdict that follows: it "is excellent reading." The flat, almost bookish review is chilling, because it treats war as a good read, something consumed from a comfortable distance and graded for quality.
The last line then widens the accusation into "our quest to be unquiet." The pronoun shifts from the lonely "my" to the shared "our," so the speaker is no longer simply a weary observer but part of a crowd. "Quest" is a noble, medieval word, borrowed here for something that is not noble at all. And "unquiet" is a strange, slightly haunted word, one that seems to hide its opposite inside itself. The sound of "quest" and "unquiet" echoing each other in the same line makes the idea feel like a pun: we go looking for the thing that destroys quiet, and we describe the search in the language of adventure.
This is where the title starts to work. "Contention" can mean a dispute, a struggle, or a claim made in argument, and the poem seems to touch all of these. There is the contention out in the world, the war in the book. There is the contention in the speaker, who curses the day but keeps reading. And there is a contention in the poem's own claim, that human beings actively seek out unrest. The wren fits here too. A bird that sings loudly from a very small body is a reminder that even the quiet-seeming, attentive creature makes a racket, so the poem may be hinting that unquiet is not something done only by other people.
Formally, the poem is spare. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, only two tercets in which short lines are interrupted by longer ones, so the rhythm keeps catching and stretching, like someone talking to themselves. The first stanza ends in a clipped curse, while the second ends on its longest line, as if the idea refuses to be cut off. The poem's significance lies in this compression. In a handful of lines it catches a very recognisable modern feeling, the mix of exhaustion, fascination and guilt that comes from following bad news, and it does so without lecturing. It leaves the reader, like the speaker, with an ear to the scandal and a book of war that is, uncomfortably, very good reading.