Shock, awe and solace

Poetry: In his fictionalised autobiography, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, Siegfried Sassoon recounts the following…

Poetry:In his fictionalised autobiography, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, Siegfried Sassoon recounts the following scene: "This morning. Suez Canal from train. Garden at Ismalia - a bit of blossom and greenery among sandy wastes.

"Waiting at Canal bridge for two big ships to go by. Talked to two Irish officers in the train. One knew Ledwidge the poet, and said, 'He could imitate birds and call them to him' - a tiny glimpse of "real life" in this desert of officer mentality. Am feeling ill and keep on coughing."

Sassoon had earlier that year, 1918, left Limerick, where he had been stationed for a brief spell - post shell-shock, and post his controversial rejection of the Great War - and where he had also written some fine poems. Little wonder, as he falls into conversation with two fellow (Irish) officers entrain to Egypt that Francis Ledwidge's name should gladly come up in conversation. Ledwidge also appears in the War Letters of that extraordinarily tragic poet and composer Ivor (Bertie) Gurney - who spent the last 15 years of his relatively brief life in a mental hospital having suffered a calamitous breakdown just before the end of the first World War, in which he saw front line action, was wounded and gassed at Passchendaele. It's August 1917: "And so Ledwidge is dead . . . He was a true poet, and the story of his life is (now) a sad but romantic tale, like that of so many others, so wastefully spent. Yet the fire may not have struck in them save for the war; anyway it was to be, and is."

Francis Ledwidge, who was already making a name for himself in Ireland prior to his death in the first World War, makes no appearance in this monumental and magnificent Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry, edited by professor of English literature at Exeter University Tim Kendall. Throughout the 37 essays, amounting to a whopping 750 pages, there is curiously little critical recognition - despite the title - of Irish poets from the south of Ireland and who fought, along with many thousands of their compatriots, in either or both world wars. Recent research has shown the numbers of men and women involved were substantial, even if, for far too long, their wartime experience was barely acknowledged in official circles. Times have changed and critical and public awareness is certainly more advanced on this issue today.

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Scattered reference here and there to Easter 1916 signatories, to Patrick McGill, Charles Donnelly (who died fighting during the Battle of Jarama, 70 years ago, in the Spanish Civil War) but the real focus when Ireland comes into view is with the post-second World War generation of northern poets, including Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and, somewhat surprisingly, Paul Muldoon. Yet there is nothing on Frank Ormsby's groundbreaking collection A Northern Spring (1986), which dramatised the experience of American soldiers in Northern Ireland on the cusp of D-Day landings, an audacious and powerful album of 36 poems that would have fitted perfectly into such a handbook as this:

A litter of blanks, a rubble of rusted

cans,

our curved huts in farmyards filled

with hens,

the whorl of an air-raid shelter

through a bank

of ferns and briars.

In a wood that is not home there is no

pain

to think how we'll be forgotten.

- 36: Postscripts

IT IS EQUALLY perplexing, given the fascinating work covered by the Handbook, as contributors range through the different cultural and historical perspectives of Scottish, English and Welsh poets and their literary contexts, that Thomas MacGreevy, first World War veteran, Irish nationalist, and conduit for the European modernist writers such as his close friends, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, makes no showing, even though his poetry is shot through with his responses to the loss of fellow soldiers, as well as his visualisation of the strange, lethal unreality of the everyday world at war.

These absences are more than filled by the quality of contributions from stellar essayists including Jon Stallworthy, Geoffrey Hill, Stan Smith and Vincent Sherry. With Marjorie Perloff on Yeats's Easter 1916, Yeats pops up again in John Lyons's War, Politics and Disappearing Poetry, while Peter MacDonald, editor of the impeccable Collected Poems: Louis MacNeice, concentrates upon Louis MacNeice's War and the pioneering critical presence in the field, Edna Longley, writes on War Pastorals, with the focus returning to the North, and Tara Christie's reading of Michael Longley and Cathal Ó Searcaigh through their understanding of first World War poet and soldier Isaac Rosenberg who, alongside Wilfred Owen, is the subject of Santanu Das's (author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, 2005) War Poetry and the Realm of the Senses.

VALUABLE MEDITATIVE WORK is rendered by Hugh Haughton in his characteristically comprehensive and authoritative essay, Anthologising War, alongside David Wheatley's timely update on the present situation in Contemporary War and the Non-Combatant Poet:

The true element of the war poem is the shortfall between artistic and actual justice, the justice it does to its own material and the human justice it cannot deliver, a gap the writer can choose to explore with full artistic honesty or evade through self-deception and wish-fulfilment.

Given our own time's appalling signature of "shock and awe", The Handbook is required reading and should be in every school, college and community library the length and breadth of the country. It is a lasting memoir of how ghastly war is and how redemptive poetry can be as a way of offering respite from the seeming endlessness of life "so wastefully spent". "Someday", wrote Ivor Gurney, "all this experience may be crystallized and glorified in me; and men shall learn what thoughts haunted the minds of men who watched the darkness grimly in desolate places".

Gerald Dawe's The Visible World: Selected Poems 1973-2003 has just been published by Morgana Verlag in a German translation by Ni Gudix. A volume of his collected criticism, The Proper Word: Ireland, Poetry, Politics, is published in June by Creighton University Press. He is currently editing, for Blackstaff Press, Earth Voices Whispering: Irish Poetry of War 1914-1945. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin

The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry Edited by Tim Kendall Oxford University Press, 754pp. £85