Customer Reviews

War Poems: An Anthology of Poetry from the 18th Cantury to the Present Day

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This historically-arranged selection of poems about warfare and its effects on the human mind, body, and heart, covers nearly 200 years between the late 1700s and the 1960s. Produced in Britain, and read by two British actors, Paul McGann and Regine Candler, it concentrates on English poets, with short forays into works by American authors.

Warhorse selections - "Charge of the Light Brigade", "In Flanders Fields" - are mixed with less well-known poems like "The Dead Statesman", a surprising (at least to me) burst of post-WWI bitterness from Kipling. Glory and horror intertwine from the earliest works to the most recent, but horror dominates as the present approaches. Changes in attitudes about war and patriotism come to vivid life. The effect of hearing these works read aloud is almost one of traveling in time. Paul McGann reads the lion's share - not surprising with so masculine a subject matter-and is IMO much the better reader, tho Ms. Candler is strikingly effective in places. The majority of works are from WWI - the period that produced so many gifted poets - and in them one hears older, strongly-held beliefs about Duty and Country clashing with the despairing fury engendered by the incomprehensible waste of trench warfare. McGann is able to bring understanding and force to everything from innocent jingoism to pity, from rage to transcendance, without forcing the material. His readings of WWII and Cold War pieces (Reed's "Lessons of the War", Lowell's "For the Union Dead", and McGough's "Icarus Allsorts" are remarkable) bring home the fear and ambivalence felt by a humanity realizing its power to destroy itself and the earth that supports it.