CLOSE READING: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.’

How form impacts persona and message in the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen

Photo by Elina Sazonova

Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen — the names of these two poets evoke, instantaneously, thoughts of the artistic heart that was moulded in the steel storm of the First World War, and, in the case of Owen, outlasted its creator’s experience of it. Owen and Sassoon had a well-known friendship, with Owen very much seeing Sassoon as a mentor. Yet although united in their experience of human-wrought horror and their creative outlet of poetry, they each had distinct approaches to using it as a means to process their experiences, particularly as pertains the way they utilised form. This analysis primarily focuses on Sassoon’s ‘The Hero’ and Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, but will also include discussion of Sassoon’s ‘The Dug Out’ as well as Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’ to formulate a more nuanced take on each poet’s use of form and how, through rhyme, metre, pronouns, and diction, the poets either close or widen the narrative distance. Through this it will become clear that form integrally serves the poetry of both poets, either through the persona in the interest of persuasion through emotional connection, pertinent to the waning Victorian tradition and used more by Sassoon, or through precise imagery and language in the interest of dissuasion through generating feelings of unease, pertinent to the emerging Modernist tradition and used more by Owen.

REVIEW: The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It by David Bell

Image from Amazon

When does a war become total? David Bell answers that typological question by illustrating the first time, to his eyes, a war ever bore the social, philosophical, and practical hallmarks of a conflict that saw mass mobilisation, radicalised war aims, and blurred the civilian-soldier line – hallmarks that, arguably, best encapsulate total war as a concept. The central thesis of The First Total War is that the Napoleonic wars demonstrated a significant break in military culture from the limited style of warfare that followed the religious wars. Bell illustrates this well and suits his purpose with this volume, although his argument forfeits detailed evaluation of total war as a continuity of features.

In Bell’s argument, the chief arena of change is social and philosophical rather than technological, though he certainly highlights the distinction between infantrymen fighting pikes versus cannon. Within the first chapter, Bell highlights the lack of distinction between spheres of life in the officer corps, where the theatre of aristocracy is staged in equal parts at court and during the campaign. Here, war is a part of social identity and a bridge to intellectualism, crossed by figures like Lauzun, Marquis de Sade, and Napoleon. These figures show their faces throughout, such as in the chapter on the National Assembly debating warmaking powers, but the throughline of cultural transformation is less clear in the rest of the book, which shifts its focus to the atrocities and radicalisation of a revolutionary army sweeping across Europe. In a way, the somewhat ambling structure of the book reflects the decline of the aristoracy as the centre of the military story into just another level of the corps in an increasingly distinct military identity.

REVIEW: The Glass Spare by Lauren DeStefano

Image from Goodreads

The Glass Spare bears all the hallmarks of its era (just past the midpoint of the 2010s YA fantasy): a vague fantastical world, a teen girl protagonist with a magical ability that jump starts the narrative, and a male love interest that becomes part of a generally flat love story. 

I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad book - these tropes wouldn’t be popular if they weren’t the perfect coat hanger for a multitude of tales. The thing is, tropes work when you do something interesting with them. For me, The Glass Spare almost reached that place, but sadly fell short. 

REVIEW: Can War Be Eliminated? by Christopher Coker

Image from Wiley

Can War Be Eliminated? is a slim volume - an essay bound up in book form, really - and that very much dictates the tack it takes to answer its provocative titular question. It is a solid overview of what war is from an evolutionary, cultural, sociological, technological, and political perspective. However, its scope is necessarily limited by its size, which in turn negatively impacts its depth in favour of breadth. 

Nothing radically new was presented and I often found the persuasiveness and cogency of the arguments to have been hindered by their briefness, and in some areas also by their lack of thorough interrogation. For example, I very much appreciated his deconstruction of the “warrior ideal” and the role it has played and continues to play in our personal and cultural construction of what war means to us. However, I found some of the logic used to interpret data on women in the armed forces to be unconvincing, even if the broader argument it fit into made sense. This lack of cogency is likely owed in large part to the broad brush strokes with which he paints most of his examples. Given that my answer to the titular question was “no” before picking up the book, I do wish that there had been deeper interrogation, but I recognise that the text is limited by its length. 

REVIEW: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Image provided by the author

I drank so much coffee while reading this book and writing this review - which, if anything, speaks to its supreme ability to make me yearn not just to return to the joys of cafes, but specifically to one run by an orc and her motely crew of companions. It is genuinely one of the most comforting, easygoing books I've read in a long time. This is a  Goldilocks book - I was not stressed over turning the pages, nor laboriously chugging along through chapters to finish it, but just in the right place: enjoying and savouring each minute spent in this world.

Legends & Lattes busies itself with eternal questions but doesn't seek to answer them through a sweeping quest or high-flung political drama. It asks how you make a break with your past and forge a future, and how you learn to find contentment and security within that future, and it does so by putting our protagonist, Viv, in the role of a coffee shop entrepreneur.

REVIEW: A Light in the Sky by Shina Reynolds

         

Image from Wink Road Press via Amazon

It has been years since I have read YA fantasy. I seem to remember clocking out around the time Holly Black’s Wicked King was released, and staying away since. Who can succinctly say why we enter reading slumps? Perhaps the most universal explanation is a host of internal and external factors clogging one’s mind. And when one’s mind is clogged, a return to known avenues that provide easily digestible escapism is a pretty solid way to return to the field. 

I had hoped that Shina Reynolds’s debut, A Light in the Sky, would be that return for me. It tells the story of Aluma Banks, the seventeen year old daughter of a war hero and an aspiring Empyrean rider - a soldier defending the kingdom of Eirelannia from the back of a winged horse. The premise of this story - the cavalry-like prestige and camaraderie of mounted soldiers, both a physical and political arena, and a young adult on the older end of the scale coming into her own - seemed like it could add something new and subversive to the otherwise familiar pathways of a magical destiny promised by the blurb. However, “familiar” ended up being the defining trait of this novel. And while familiarity was what I was going in for, I was still hoping for some oomph, something that pulled my emotions from my chest even if it didn’t challenge the foundations of my being.

REVIEW: The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories by Nina Allan

Image from Titan books

This review contains mild spoilers for the stories Amethyst, Heroes, A Thread of Truth, and Marielena in this collection. 

Short story collections serve many purposes. They are catalogues of an author’s smaller opuses, or a snapshot of one era in their careers. The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories is a map, one in which the author as cartographer charts a journey that the reader is invited to follow. The stories, edited into one volume, are active participants in a larger tale exploring the author’s craft, and are “evaluating their relationship to a world that has changed since they were created”, as she says in her introduction. The introduction is, in and of itself, a highlight of the collection, replete with erudite and imagery-rich ruminations on the skill and imaginative power that drives and is driven by short fiction, in particular speculative fiction. Her commentary on the place of short stories in the careers of debut writers entering the market is set to strike a chord in every creative heart that has sought to have its words heard by others.