Mice & Other Poems

These are poems written in the aftermath of everything. Gerald Bullett, Cambridge graduate and prolific man of letters, assembled this small volume in the uneasy silence that followed the Great War, when a generation of young writers felt a "crowding impulse to say something" and said it with the emotional seriousness poetry demands. The title is deceptively gentle: Mice & Other Poems suggests small creatures, domestic concerns, the intimate and the overlooked. But there is bite beneath the quiet surface. These are poems that refuse to sentimentalize yet refuse to despair entirely, written in precise, disciplined verse that captures what it felt like to be young and alive in a world that had just proved it could destroy itself. Bullett moves between the whimsical and the weighty with ease, finding the extraordinary in modest things while never turning away from larger griefs. The collection embodies that particular post-war stance: battered, perhaps, but still listening, still paying attention, still believing that language carefully chosen might matter.