Trench Ballads, and Other Verses

These are not poems written from safety. Erwin Clarkson Garrett heard the shells fall in French trenches, felt the mud suck at his boots, watched men die beside him. This collection, drawn directly from his service in the American Expeditionary Forces, offers something rare: front-line testimony from an ordinary soldier who happened to write with uncommon power. The trench ballads pulse with dark humor, exhausted camaraderie, and a kind of stubborn humanity that refuses to be extinguished by rain and rifle fire. Garrett opens with a nod to his father's Civil War service, establishing a lineage of American sons sent to bleed in foreign fields. The pre-war poems carry the weight of knowing what's coming. The other verses broaden outward, but always with that trench-borne clarity, that refusal to look away. This is WWI poetry that doesn't perform heroism or atrocity but simply records what it felt like to survive the unspeakable, day after day.