Ed. Jon Stallworthy (Oxford University Press) 9780198704485 £10.99

What is so refreshing about this new paperback edition of a collection that originally appeared from O.U.P. over thirty years ago is the wide range of its focus. For teachers and pupils who are studying poetry of the First World War it is of tremendous importance to gain some sense of context and perspective and Jon Stallworthy’s introduction is as sharp and clear now as it was back in the auspicious year 1984:

So long as warrior met warrior in equal combat with sword or lance, poets could celebrate their courage and chivalry, but as technology put ever-increasing distance between combatants and, then, ceased to distinguish between combatant and civilian, poets more and more responded to man’s inhumanity to man.

In his updated second introduction, titled ‘Thirty Years On’, Stallworthy raises important points about education in terms of pupils and teachers reading poetry of the Second World War and beyond:

Too many schoolchildren (and too many teachers) need to be reminded how warfare—and poetry—have changed since 1918. For three-quarters of a century, hostile fire from the sky has been as common as fire from the ground; and poetry has sought to regain territory ‘lost’ to prose fiction, frequently with prosaic results. The Second World War produced as least as many potent poems as the First but, like any war, many more that were impotent.

This remarkable anthology contains extracts from Homer and Virgil as well as Ezra Pound’s deeply moving ‘translation’ from the Chinese of the 8th century Rihaku, ‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’. It takes us from Milton and Dryden to the effects of war on the domesticity of home life in Wordsworth to Rilke’s 1907 poem ‘Last Evening’.

If I have any sense of sadness at what has been left out it is at the absence of an extract from Tony Harrison’s powerful poems from the First Gulf War, A Cold Coming (Bloodaxe) and something from Salt’s 2003 publication 100 Poets Against the War with its powerful little piece by the Bristol poet Tony Lewis-Jones, ‘At Home, At War’:

Now there is silence in the house, except
The pipes tap-tapping under floorboards and
The clocks’ slow rhythmic messages. You are
Late coming home for an argument:
The night holds terrors every parent knows.
Your mother is away. She, I’m certain,
Would have played this same weak hand
Quite differently. The morning paper
Demonstrates with images how words
Can lose all meaning: mouths that cannot speak
Tell how desperately we need to understand
Wars begin when language fails us. The missiles
Fall, undiverted by the right command.

Ian Brinton 21/1/2016