Poems

1915. The Great War is tearing Europe apart, and a young Australian poet named Elinor Jenkins watches everything she loves disappear into mud and machine gun fire. These poems pulse with the ache of lives interrupted, of telegrams arriving at doorsteps, of women standing at windows waiting for figures that never come. Jenkins writes with startling directness about what war does to those left behind: the mothers, the sweethearts, the wives. Yet this is not mere elegy. Her verses crackle with fury at the raw injustice of young men fed into the grinder, with grief so sharp it becomes its own kind of prayer. Nature threads through her work like a lament, indifferent and beautiful while humanity destroys itself. This is wartime poetry that refuses to look away from the unspeakable, transforming personal heartbreak into a witness statement for a generation silenced.