Customer Reviews

9 reviews

• Oxford Alumni Book Club

  A physician by career, Ken (Pembroke, 1961) was born in World War Two but ends his poetry collection reprinting a poem about his uncle’s death in World War One, aged 18, in 1918. To get there, poems cover personal matters such as transience and grief, love and loss. Some are addressed to his wife or his sons, or friends at times of tragedy. But there is a steady beat of international affairs such as a series of incredulous poems, each dated to the time they were written, addressing Blair and Bush’s ‘Christian’ assault on Iraq in 2003. And the lunacy of Trump. And other poems like them. When it all comes down to it, the final poem about being shot down flying over the Western Front in 1918, age 18, is still locked into a heroic mode that jars in light of Sassoon and co since, never mind the reappraisal of the trenches that took place in the 1960s. But the point made is the senseless death and the collapsing of time occasioned, one might guess, by Russia’s assault on Ukraine. His final words are a commentary on that poem as a record of senseless death at a terribly early age: ‘…it is striking how much has changed and yet how much stays the same from one generation to the next. What do you think?’

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