Poems

Isaac Rosenberg wrote his way into immortality in the twenty-seven years he was given, and then the war took him. A Jewish immigrant's son who grew up in poverty in South Africa before moving to England, Rosenberg brought to the trenches an artist's eye for brutal, unexpected imagery and a poet's gift for making the unsayable sing. His war poems crackle with a dark, strange beauty. In "Break of Day in the Trenches," the famous poppy becomes a "rusty halo" and the world shrinks to mud and wire. He writes about death with the intimacy of someone who has touched it. These aren't poems about glory or patriotism; they're poems about young men in holes in the ground, about the beauty of a bird seen through gas fumes, about the absurd preciousness of life when shrapnel whistles overhead. Rosenberg died in 1918, on the Western Front, three weeks before the armistice. What remains is a small, fierce body of work that burns with the particular intensity of a talent that never got to fully flower. For readers who want poetry that cuts, that refuses comfort, that finds something almost holy in the wreckage, this is it.