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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Poetry Is In The Pity, 6 Dec 2003
I rather disagreed with the ethics of the publisher in his decision to place Rupert Brooke first in his haphazard order; the fact that each poet was accompanied by a full-page photograph of himself suggested to me that Brooke's pride of place was due mainly to his status as everybody's favourite pin-up poet. For this admittedly rather superficial reason, I recoiled upon initially opening the book, and was quite prepared to flick disdainfully through the remainder before discarding it as a commercialist re-dredging of the nation's favourite war poets.Not so. The poems are carefully selected, the short biographies thorough and sensitive. In this book, the dedicated fan will be delighted to find images of the poets' original manuscripts and scribbled corrections. Particularly charming is an early draft of Owen's untouchable classic, 'Anthem For Doomed Youth', complete with Sassoon's pencilled corrections. One can almost see the two of them battling over the paper, Owen submitting reverently to Sassoon's 'lordly dictums about poetry'. And such is the nature of this book; the poets seem almost to step out of the pages, living reminders of those dreadful days that are 'too terrible to remember, too important to forget'. The famous faces are there - and this quite literally; the discerning female reader cannot help but catch her breath over the Byronically devastating photographs of such aesthetic giants as Brooke and Sassoon, sympathetically shot in a chiaroscuro of shadow and light. But then, there are the others: Rosenburg, Sorley; equally splendid poets who have, for some reason, not flourished in their fame in the same way that Sassoon, Owen and Brooke have done. The book may begin with Brooke, the idealistic, almost-a-soldier-poet whose patriotic whimsy contrasts so fiercely with Sassoon's harsh realism, but it leads us into a No Man's Land of men who do not deserve to be forgotten, 'the legions that have suffered and are dust.'
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by Sebastian Faulks
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by Virginia Woolf
by Catherine W. Reilly
