War is hell -- or so the saying goes. But war is also the ultimate muse, for it drags both its victors and victims through a whole range of emotional landscapes -- fear, triumph, despair, longing, valor, pride, and comraderie. These landscapes are beautifully painted in words by the poems selected by Jon Stallworthy for The Oxford Book of War Poetry. For example, these lines from "Into Battle," by Julian Grenfel:
The kestral hovering by day,
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be keen and swift as they,
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.
The blackbird sings to him, 'Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another;
Brother, sing.'
Stallworthy's selections demonstrate that a soldier is not simply a machine of the government he or she serves. Most of the poems in this collection were written by poets who "walked the walk" in the battlefield. There were there in the trenches. C. Day Lewis captures the mood of men at the ready in his poem "The Stand-To":
Last night a Stand-To was ordered. Thirty men of us here
Came out to guard the star-lit village my men who wear
Unwitting the season's beauty, the received truth of the spade --
Roadmen, farm laborers, masons, turned to another trade.
A dog barked over the fields, the candle stars put a sheen
On the rifles ready, the sandbags fronded with evergreen:
The dawn wind blew, the stars winked out on the posts where we lay,
The order came, Stand Down, and thirty went away.
One of my favorite poems in this collection is "Advice to a Raven in Russia," by Joel Barlow:
Black fool, why winter here? These frozen skies,
Worn by your wings and deafened by your cries,
Should warn you hence, where milder suns invite,
And day alternates with his mother night.
There are, of course, the obligatory poems by the famous war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as the well-known poem "In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae. However, you'll also find great poems by such contemporary poets as Margaret Atwood, Galway Kinnell, Seamus Heaney and Carolyn Forche.
