Laurie Smith reviews 101 Poems Against War edited by Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan (Faber £8.99)
In its quiet way, this anthology brilliantly seizes the moment. Published during the build up to the recent Iraq war, it provides most of the evidence poetry readers need that, in terms of the human spirit, wars are never justified, not even the just ones. Uniquely for an anthology, there is no introduction explaining the principles on which the editors chose the poems. It is as if reading the poems is so urgent that nothing should delay it. Similarly Andrew Motion's Afterword consists of general comments on war poetry, unrelated to the particular poems. Extraordinarily in an anthology, the poems are allowed to speak wholly for themselves.
After this surprise, there is another: the poems seem to have no discernible order, ranging randomly across centuries and across the world. This strategy demonstrates more clearly than words that war has been opposed at all times and everywhere, but in fact the order is anything but random. Consider the first eight poems: two fragments of Ancient Greek, one lamenting the dead of Thermopylai, the second sharply undermining Spartan militarism; a quiet dismissal of military pomp by Emily Dickinson and Owen's Dulce et Decorum; a Paul Durcan couplet on Irish communal murder and Pastor Niemöller's couplets on Nazi communal murder, "First they came for the Jews"; Auden's camp ballad of approaching threat O what is that sound and Sappho's dismissal of military power compared to the power of the woman she loves.
These establish an inclusiveness that continues throughout the anthology: pre-20th century poems (18), poems translated from languages other than English (27 with German and Arabic most numerous), poems by women (15) and poems by gay and lesbian writers (at least three of the first seven and many later). This range is permitted by the editors' wise decision to limit each poet to a maximum of two poems.
Like all good anthologies, it includes poems that one expects - many of the classic anti-war poems are here - and poems that are unfamiliar. I am grateful to be introduced to Edna St Vincent Millay's Conscientious Objector, Elizabeth Bishop's From Trollope's Journal and, above all, Ho Thien's Green Beret. This ferocious celebration, translated from the Vietnamese, of a small boy's willingness to see his father shot rather than to betray the Viet Cong is the only poem that gives insight into a peasant people's determination to resist overwhelming military strength. From a country where a Hanoi museum contains tributes only to mothers who lost six sons in the struggle (those losing five or fewer sons being too numerous to mention), this should give us pause.
Oddly, the anthology falters on the subject of Northern Ireland. It has Michael Longley's savage Wounds, but a couplet by Paul Durcan rather than, for example, The Bloomsday Murders for which Durcan received death threats. And that's all. Most peculiar of all are the two Heaneys, Sophoclean and Testimony, both very distant from the experience of communal terror that he rendered in North and the early poems of Fieldwork, and more recently in The Flight Path in The Spirit Level. Possibly Heaney refused permission for his accounts of communal struggle, however violent, to be described as war.
101 Poems Against War sets a new standard by which future anthologies on the subject will be judged. It makes us aware that Owen's "pity of War" is not now owed to the combatants of Western nations who are increasingly protected by military technology, but rather to those with little or no protection - civilians, women, children, citizens of poorer nations who may now be subject to 'preemptive strike' as a perceived threat or for their resources. It looks to the day when the chief war poet in our school textbooks is no longer Wilfred Owen but someone like Ho Thien.
After this surprise, there is another: the poems seem to have no discernible order, ranging randomly across centuries and across the world. This strategy demonstrates more clearly than words that war has been opposed at all times and everywhere, but in fact the order is anything but random. Consider the first eight poems: two fragments of Ancient Greek, one lamenting the dead of Thermopylai, the second sharply undermining Spartan militarism; a quiet dismissal of military pomp by Emily Dickinson and Owen's Dulce et Decorum; a Paul Durcan couplet on Irish communal murder and Pastor Niemöller's couplets on Nazi communal murder, "First they came for the Jews"; Auden's camp ballad of approaching threat O what is that sound and Sappho's dismissal of military power compared to the power of the woman she loves.
These establish an inclusiveness that continues throughout the anthology: pre-20th century poems (18), poems translated from languages other than English (27 with German and Arabic most numerous), poems by women (15) and poems by gay and lesbian writers (at least three of the first seven and many later). This range is permitted by the editors' wise decision to limit each poet to a maximum of two poems.
Like all good anthologies, it includes poems that one expects - many of the classic anti-war poems are here - and poems that are unfamiliar. I am grateful to be introduced to Edna St Vincent Millay's Conscientious Objector, Elizabeth Bishop's From Trollope's Journal and, above all, Ho Thien's Green Beret. This ferocious celebration, translated from the Vietnamese, of a small boy's willingness to see his father shot rather than to betray the Viet Cong is the only poem that gives insight into a peasant people's determination to resist overwhelming military strength. From a country where a Hanoi museum contains tributes only to mothers who lost six sons in the struggle (those losing five or fewer sons being too numerous to mention), this should give us pause.
Oddly, the anthology falters on the subject of Northern Ireland. It has Michael Longley's savage Wounds, but a couplet by Paul Durcan rather than, for example, The Bloomsday Murders for which Durcan received death threats. And that's all. Most peculiar of all are the two Heaneys, Sophoclean and Testimony, both very distant from the experience of communal terror that he rendered in North and the early poems of Fieldwork, and more recently in The Flight Path in The Spirit Level. Possibly Heaney refused permission for his accounts of communal struggle, however violent, to be described as war.
101 Poems Against War sets a new standard by which future anthologies on the subject will be judged. It makes us aware that Owen's "pity of War" is not now owed to the combatants of Western nations who are increasingly protected by military technology, but rather to those with little or no protection - civilians, women, children, citizens of poorer nations who may now be subject to 'preemptive strike' as a perceived threat or for their resources. It looks to the day when the chief war poet in our school textbooks is no longer Wilfred Owen but someone like Ho Thien.
Page(s) 51-52
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