Reviews for Up the line to death

The average rating for Up the line to death based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-12-30 00:00:00 Jose Santos Years ago, one of my teachers spoke of the importance of five minute books. His point being that no time needed to be wasted. Waiting for a bus, read the book you carried with you for that purpose. Waiting in the dentist or doctor, the same book. In a traffic jam, don't get angry and road ragey, open your little escape volume and slip into somewhere better. This i have done for years but ironically it had never been a huge habit of mine to have books in the smallest room in the house but over the last five years or so various volumes of poetry, largely anthologies seem to have found their way to my downstairs loo by a series of secret moves known only to my literary guardian angel. As a result I have encountered a number of short moments of revelation which serve to enhance an otherwise necessary literary dry time. It was over the last seven or eight months that I have read this extraordinary collection of poems brought together by Brian Gardner and introduced with a short foreword by Edmund Blunden. And these poems do not take you to a better place but make you grateful for the courage of these men and sorrow for the waste of their sacrifice. In this collection the well known sit alongside the totally unknown, the brilliant and sparkling talents alongside the lost and wasted. It is an almost unbearable wading through the horror and tragedy of the 'Great War' expressed in hope, hell and humour in if not equal measure then certainly in notiecable presence. Writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Maurice Baring, Laurence Binyon, EE Cummings, Rupert Brook and Wilfred Owen who are well known and recognized literary figures even if , with a number of them, they did not outlast the war, are drawn together with far lesser known and, to me at least in many cases, quite unknown poets. This lack of knowledge is one of the stark sadnesses. Some of the poetry of the unknown men seems mere doggerel against some of the towering creations of others but a sad realization is the one whereby you recognize that perhaps what lay trampled and blown to bits in the trenches were their immature poetic minds. What might have been brought out on the page by some of these men had they survived the terror and brutal destruction? This we will never know and that perhaps is one of the most striking images for me. One minor gripe is the fact that all the poets are from the side of the allies. Maybe this is inevitable given when the collection was first made in 1964 but i wonder whether poets from Imperial Germany or their allies should not be included so as to really show the similarity of feeling rather than perpetuating the lie of difference. Two poets of whom I knew nothing leapt out from the page. Isaac Rosenberg, of whom more in another book review to be posted, and Charles Sorley. Rosenberg killed April 1st 1918 and Sorley killed on October 13th 1915. Two wasted young poets who wrote beautiful verse but what might they have achieved had they lived. These young men stand as symbols of the wasted talent and unfulfilled lives of not just poets but scientists or sportsmen or fathers or gardners or teachers or bakers or well obviously I could go on. Brilliant collection but made all the more moving by virtue of the expressions or images or word paintings that were never seen or read or heard because they were blown to bits in the war to end all wars. Oh yeah and Gardner brought out an anthology of the next war as well. You know the one that obviously didn't really happen.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-04-28 00:00:00 Stephen Vesecky Collection of devastating poems written mostly by the people who were there, most of whom died during WWI. An anthology of poems are not necessarily read straight through and I kept these where I could pick it up for a stray moment here or there. Many of these poets were not well known. Although the collection certainly included Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves. I appear to have flagged only one poem, Rendezvous by Alan Seeger. I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade