Books: From the Line; Scottish War Poetry 1914-1945

‘From the Line’ is the title of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) anthology of Scottish poetry produced during or after the two World Wars of the previous century.

This forty-third annual volume of the ASLS is, like most anthologies of verse, something of a mixed bag, but not necessarily the worse for that.

By collecting some twenty-six poets’ views of the First World War and thirty of the Second, it illustrates considerable change of concern and emphasis over both the two wars and the intervening period.

Although it is both fitting and an appropriate introduction to the entire volume to place Marion Angus’ ‘Remembrance’ as the opening poem, some of the poetry, especially from the early years of the First World War expresses an enthusiastic patriotism and optimism that makes for less than comfortable reading for a modern, more knowing sensibility, but is surely a reflection of the attitudes of those times.

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, better known but not included on grounds of nationality, left the magazine they had created for Craiglockhart Hospital – ‘Hydra’ in the hands of J. B. Salmond, this reviewer’s distant relative, when they returned to active service. Salmond’s poetry features here, and his ‘Pilgrimage’ captures something of the nostalgic, guilty pride that many survivors of conflict experience.

Yet, as with the poetry of Marion Angus and Violet Jacob, who both feature here, poems set far from the front often hit the hardest, as in Charles Murray’s ‘Docken Afore his Peers’, in which an up-country farmer pleads the case of his farm workers and especially his youngest son to an exemption (from enlistment) tribunal.

As one might expect, the twenty years between the two World Wars produced not only changes in attitudes but also in the ways in which these were expressed. Two of Flora Garry’s poems, one in standard English, one in braid Buchan reflect civilian experience with both flair and accuracy, while those of Robert Garrioch and Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley Maclean) perhaps suggest more of the feelings of the ordinary soldier than the measured eloquence of the two ‘Elegies’ of Hamish Henderson reproduced here, while Henderson’s vivid ‘The 51st Highland Division’s Farewell to Sicily’ really needs the pipe tune to which it is sung to lift it off the page.

These cavils aside, this volume represents a considerable achievement on the part of the editors, David Goldie and Roderick Watson, in gathering together the work of so many apparently differing writers around a single theme, and represents excellent value to all with a serious interest in Scottish poetry of the previous century.

‘From the Line; Scottish War Poetry 1914-1945’ David Goldie and Roderick Watson (eds), Association for Scottish Literary Studies, £12.50 isbn 9 789106 841164