The Not Dead By Simon Armitage
Posted at 10:44AM Tuesday 30 Dec 2008
The Not Dead
ISBN: 9781904590187
Say "war poetry" and it's the gas and trenches of the first world war that come to mind. But as Simon Armitage points out in the introduction to this slim, sober collection, "warfare has changed, and so has poetry". In these poems, drawn from the experiences of soldiers who fought in the Gulf, Bosnian and Malayan wars, and originally aired as part of a 2007 documentary, Armitage shows us that modern war poetry, like modern combat, is provisional, chancy, unresolved. These are poems of survivors - the damaged, exhausted men who return from war in body but never, wholly, in mind. In terse, undecorated language, Armitage conveys their sense of nullification, focusing on war's endlessness, the past barrelling insistently into the present at every turn. At one remove from the wars he's writing about, Armitage positions himself as a witness not to the dead but to the living
Guardian review
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