War and the Pity of War - Hardcover

Award-winning artist Michael McCurdy has illustrated more than 170 books for adults and children. His books often explore America’s past, bringing to life its history and traditions. He lives with his wife, Deborah, on a farm in western Massachusetts.

Gr. 6 and up. With so much attention focused on Spielberg's war movie, Saving Private Ryan, teens will be open to this somber anthology and to the questions the poems raise for each of us. Is war about glory, as in Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" and in the traditional war songs of the Ojibwa? Or is war about horror, as in most twentieth-century poetry? Philip's answer in his fine introduction is that even the poetry about the cruelty of war records the bravery and dignity of soldiers and civilians. As in all noteworthy world anthologies, the meaning is also in the connections across time and place (from ancient China and classical Greece to Hiroshima, Vietnam, and Bosnia), with much in translation from the French, German, Russian, Japanese, and more. At the center are the great World War I poets, many of them soldiers, who saw not the honor, but the futility. A brief note with each poem indicates when it was written and which war it refers to. Wherever they come from, the voices are as plain and recognizable as Auden's Roman Wall soldier who doesn't know why he's there ("I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose"). The book design is spacious and open, with thick paper and clear type, and Michael McCurdy's powerful scratchboard drawings in black and white, some small, some full-page, show the humanity and the ruin of those who came back and those left "hanging on the old barbed wire." Hazel Rochman