To mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and served in France and Flanders. This selection of his poems includes a substantial sampler of his war verse (the last poem he wrote was on revisiting the battlefields of the Somme). And yet, it is not easy to draw a line between the poems on war and those on other subjects, so deeply did his wartime experience suffuse and haunt his writing. Memories of what was ‘shrieking, dumb, defiled’ constantly test a vision of ‘faith, life, virtue in the sun’. Here is a poet of range and depth deserving of rediscovery.
A propos de l’auteur
Robyn Marsack began her long association with Carcanet Press by editing the first edition of Edmund Blunden’s Selected Poems in 1982, and worked as a publishers’ editor until she became Director of the Scottish Poetry Library 2000–2016. She was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Glasgow 2016–2018. She has co-edited several poetry anthologies, including Oxford Poets 2013 with Iain Galbraith, and edited Blunden’s Fall In, Ghosts: selected war prose, published by Carcanet in 2014.