What do you think?
Rate this book
War Poems: An Anthology of Unforgettable Verse
A collection of war poems edited by Brian Busby
- GenresPoetry
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
10 people want to read
About the author
Brian Busby
18 books2 followersBrian John Busby is a literary historian and anthologist.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 26, 2021
Review of War Poems by Brian Busby
This anthology is a much wider collection than just one devoted to collecting the poems of soldiers who served in World War One. It covers much earlier writing such as Michael Drayton’s Fair Stood the wind for France with Drayton’s rather impossible title. And there are much later poets. I was surprised with the contribution of Yusuf Komunyakaa, The Dead at Quang Tri. The appendix giving short biographical notes is very helpful in explaining who poets like Komunyakaa are.
Other unusual inclusions were John Milton, Andrew Marvell William Davenant and John Keats, However, much as I appreciate La Belle Dame Sans Merci, I do not think of it as a war poem even now. The contributions from Wordsworth like so, except I wondered why Character of the Happy Warrior missed inclusion.
The range of poems is very extensive, The oldest I noted was The Lament of Maeve Leith Dherg, which must be a translation from Gaelic. (There is no entry for this poem in Wikipedia or Poem Hunter which may indicate its obscurity,) The most recent poem is Brian Turner’s Here Bullet which he notes as written in Mosul in February 2004.
Busby is Canadian so we expect to find John McCrae’s’ In Flander’s Fields, but we also learn McCrae also served in South Africa in 1900 and wrote poetry there too. We are also given some more of the American Alan Seeger beyond I have a rendezvous with death, in the form of Resurgam.
It was encouraging to see some poems by Katherine Mansfield, (The man with the wooden leg, and To L,H,B. (1894-1915), the latter the first I had seen of a more public expression of her grief at the death of her brother, Leslie,
I did n’t find anything by Australian poets although Banjo Patterson also served as a stretcher bearer in South Africa. However, as I recall these poems were rather jingoistic in spirit.
What I did like, however was the work of other Canadian soldier poets, such as H Smalley Sarson with four contributions. Busby also incudes some interesting pieces by Horace Bray, and Bernard Freeman Trotter. It is important to realise that not all the soldier poets were English. He certainly has a more extensive number of soldier poets than other anthologists and so gives us a deeper understanding of how poetry was an important way of understanding the experience of the men who stood in the trenches.
His introduction also offers a reason why we do not see much poetry by soldier poets now, although with his inclusion of poems from Vietnam and Iraq he makes the point that such men and women are still writing.
This anthology is a much wider collection than just one devoted to collecting the poems of soldiers who served in World War One. It covers much earlier writing such as Michael Drayton’s Fair Stood the wind for France with Drayton’s rather impossible title. And there are much later poets. I was surprised with the contribution of Yusuf Komunyakaa, The Dead at Quang Tri. The appendix giving short biographical notes is very helpful in explaining who poets like Komunyakaa are.
Other unusual inclusions were John Milton, Andrew Marvell William Davenant and John Keats, However, much as I appreciate La Belle Dame Sans Merci, I do not think of it as a war poem even now. The contributions from Wordsworth like so, except I wondered why Character of the Happy Warrior missed inclusion.
The range of poems is very extensive, The oldest I noted was The Lament of Maeve Leith Dherg, which must be a translation from Gaelic. (There is no entry for this poem in Wikipedia or Poem Hunter which may indicate its obscurity,) The most recent poem is Brian Turner’s Here Bullet which he notes as written in Mosul in February 2004.
Busby is Canadian so we expect to find John McCrae’s’ In Flander’s Fields, but we also learn McCrae also served in South Africa in 1900 and wrote poetry there too. We are also given some more of the American Alan Seeger beyond I have a rendezvous with death, in the form of Resurgam.
It was encouraging to see some poems by Katherine Mansfield, (The man with the wooden leg, and To L,H,B. (1894-1915), the latter the first I had seen of a more public expression of her grief at the death of her brother, Leslie,
I did n’t find anything by Australian poets although Banjo Patterson also served as a stretcher bearer in South Africa. However, as I recall these poems were rather jingoistic in spirit.
What I did like, however was the work of other Canadian soldier poets, such as H Smalley Sarson with four contributions. Busby also incudes some interesting pieces by Horace Bray, and Bernard Freeman Trotter. It is important to realise that not all the soldier poets were English. He certainly has a more extensive number of soldier poets than other anthologists and so gives us a deeper understanding of how poetry was an important way of understanding the experience of the men who stood in the trenches.
His introduction also offers a reason why we do not see much poetry by soldier poets now, although with his inclusion of poems from Vietnam and Iraq he makes the point that such men and women are still writing.
Read
December 28, 2015bought this book to reference the snippets of poems quoted in some of the books i've read. many authors quote 'the art of war' or kipling mostly. then you run in an author that quotes some one else. i like finding these quotes gives me another insight to the book, story line and author.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews