A Deep Cry

Arranged by dates of death, this anthology gives the short life-and-death stories of 66 British poets killed in northern France and Belgium, including an account of the battle in which each died, with extracts from their poems, letters and diaries. The chronology begins with Robert Sterling, killed in April 1915; it ends with Wilfred Owen's death a week before the Armistice in 1918, the early optimism and fervour now replaced by cynicism and awful reality. From the trenches, behind the lines, in hospitals and on leave, these soldier-poets wrote of the "carnage incomparable", the suffering and grim conditions they experienced, and of the solace they found in comradeship and the continuing cycle of nature amid the horrors of war. Although some names are well known - Owen, Rosenberg, Sorley and Edward Thomas - others are less so, but the intimate personal accounts in their letters home, and in diaries and poems, afford us a glimpse into the intense emotional experiernce of the combatant at war.

Résumé
The lives, deaths, poetry, diaries and extracts from letters of sixty-six soldier-poets are brought together in this limited edition of Anne Powell's unique anthology; a fitting commemoration for the centenary of the First World War. These poems are not simply the works of well-known names such as Wilfred Owen though they are represented they have been painstakingly collected from a multitude of sources, and the relative obscurity of some of the voices makes the message all the more moving. Moreover, all but five of these soldiers lie within forty-five miles of Arras. Their deaths are described here in chronological order, with an account of each man's last battle. This in itself provides a revealing gradual change in the poetry from early naïve patriotism to despair about the human race and the bitterness of 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.