'This volume samples the poetry of twenty-five poets associated with the State of Victoria who were publishing significant work during the First World War. The collection is as much a social and cultural map of women’s attitudes and occupations as it is a poetry anthology. Short accounts of the poets’ lives and their publishing history provide insights into the way the War shaped their everyday concerns. The book expands common notions of what constitutes war poetry, and testifies to the social role and styles of poetry in general. These poets wrote at a time when poetry was a public art, as their work was widely published in the daily and weekly media as well as single volumes of the period and shortly thereafter.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Just as fiction’s George Smiley made sense of the world - and even made his baffling way about a world at war through knowing the works of minor German poets - our own very real Michael Sharkey (who has an equally resonant and unlikely name) has found that his passion for a certain strain of minor poets also intersects with history, war, intrigue, political resistance and troubling nationalism.' (Introduction)
'Just as fiction’s George Smiley made sense of the world - and even made his baffling way about a world at war through knowing the works of minor German poets - our own very real Michael Sharkey (who has an equally resonant and unlikely name) has found that his passion for a certain strain of minor poets also intersects with history, war, intrigue, political resistance and troubling nationalism.' (Introduction)
