A Son of the Rock

faber and faber, 2003, 188 p including v p introduction. Borrowed from a threatened library.

As far as poetry goes this is more what I am used to – from a long time ago at school. All the usual suspects are here, Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, Yeats, Hardy, Kipling, but Motion includes more from Ivor Gurney than other compilations have and he has also chosen post war and modern poems from MacDiarmid, Larkin, Hughes and Heaney. Normally omitted from such collections, a feature here is poetry about the war written by women; mainly expressing their experience of loss, imminently in Helen Mackay’s Train, after the fact in Margaret Postgate Cole’s Praematuri and underlined by the powerful last line of Eleanor Farjeon’s Easter Monday (In Memoriam E T, “There are three letters which you will not get,”) but note in the extract from Rose Macaulay’s Picnic how quotidian the distant war would become.

New to me (I think) were Charles Hamilton Sorley notably ‘When you see millions…’ and Edward Thomas (In Memoriam (Easter 1915) and The Cherry Trees.) I also do not remember reading Edmund Blunden’s Concert Party: Busseboom before.

Unlike most such collections, we get here, too, the common soldiers’ demotic expression of their lot in, for example, Song, “Do your balls hang low? …. Can you sling them on your shoulder/like a lousy fucking soldier?” and Tiddleywinks, Old Man (“Find a woman if you can”) which leads on to “You’ll never get your bollocks in a corn-beef can,” plus the bitter irony of The Old Battalion “hanging on the old barbed wire.”