A Jetblack Sunrise. Poems about War and Conflict

There isn’t a shortage of anthologies of war poetry for young adults, but this is an outstanding collection. Mark restricts her choice largely to poems originally written in the English language, and the conflicts are largely British or American. Nevertheless, there is a wide experience of war here, from Agincourt to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and, while there are some predictable poets and poems, many more are surprising and thought-provoking, reflecting the depth of Mark’s reading and the subtlety of her approach. She is as much concerned with the causes and repercussions of political violence, both social and individual, as with the direct experience of the battlefield.

Her arrangement is as original as her choice of poems. As she admits in her foreword, few readers are likely to read an anthology as they would a novel from the beginning to the end, but those that take the hint, and do exactly that, will find themselves on a dramatic journey. We begin with aspirations for peace, pass through a growing clamour of incitement and exhortation, are caught up in battle, faced with the aftermath and casualties of war, and finally left in an incomplete peace. In this last condition, as in the last 50 years in Britain, war and the threat of war remain constant, even if the fighting may be in the news rather than in the next street. Individual poems will make demands on the perception and empathy of any reader of whatever age, but this is in the nature of the subject matter. The final line of the anthology, from a Margaret Atwood poem, puts it succinctly: ‘for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.’

It’s a pity that the book’s production does not do justice to the text. To a generation familiar with the harrowing photographic images of modern war reportage, and in the context of the poems, John Yates’s black and white illustrations may seem inconsequential. The cover does the book no favours. It’s a collection that will need promoting to young people.