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The Unutterable Beauty: The Collected Poems of G A Studdert-Kennedy ('Woodbine Willie')

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G.A. Studdert-Kennedy's collection of poems, "The Utterable Beauty,' has some verses in cockney dialect from his service as a WWI British chaplain (handing out "Woodbine" cigarettes to the doughboys), and most of them grow out of his wrestling with the suffering of war, insensitivity, and misfortune, but these verses rise in truth to the level of "The Unutterable Beauty." Probably the most widely known poem in the lot is "Indifference" ("When Jesus came to Birmingham") but the crown jewel is his poem, "The Suffering God."

I was first shown Studdert-Kennedy's WWI poems in 1960, and bought my first copy that year. I have since owned several and given them away - a bit like Kennedy's own life, in which his wife would come home to the parsonage to discover that Studdert had given their bed to some poor family.
G A Studdert-Kennedy's poems (like his fiercely written devotional and exhortatory books) overflow with love and tenderness, passion and anger against injustice, hypocrisy and cant. He demolishes the sub-christian theology of triumphalism, and writes, "...and I hate the God of power on his hellish heavenly throne, looking down on rape and murder, hearing little children moan ... [a bit later:] God, the God I love and worship, reigns in sorrow on the tree; broken, bleeding, but unconquered, very God of God to me..." (from "High and Lifted Up".
The poems, "Rough Rhymes of a Padre" was his own title for the first edition, reflect the man. He is no polished poet, but a passionate Christian minister who got his Woodbine Willie nickname (also the title of his biography by William Purcell) because instead of staying in the officers' mess with the other chaplains, he was down in the trenches handing out Woodbine cigarettes. After the war he became a pacifist, and fought that battle just as fiercely as all others, until his untimely death in (I think) 1929.
I'm buying two copies of the book now, one to keep forever - it will be, as were others before it, one of my most treasured possessions - the other for the inevitable gift to someone who needs to hear the authentic voice of the God who suffers with us.

There is something for everyone here from the much-loved Woodbine puffing chaplain - something for poetry lovers, war or military historians and/or Christians - they will find all something of interest in these pages. I found his haunting 'lyrics' unforgetable.

A lesser know war poet, but well recommended, who understood too well his men's feeling of God having deserted them to their trench hell. Faith finds it hard to adjust to horrors of war like this, but the feeling of being abandoned and crying out to God from the mire is honestly explored in this hauntingly beautiful poetry.

Another war poet I liked is -
The Ghosts of No Man's Land - The Rhymes of a Red Cross Man