Voice of the desert war

Press, 19 August 1978, Page 17

Voice of the desert war

The Complete Poems of Keith Douglas. Edited by Desmond Graham. Oxford University Press. $11.25. (Reviewed by Peter Simpson) Wars kill fairly indiscriminately. The poets go down with the rest. We tend to think of the First World War as the poet’s war; from Rupert Brooke celebrating the eagerness and elation with which his generation embraced the fight (“like swimmers into greenness leaping”) to Wilfred Owen’s outraged requiems of pity for those killed in the trenches. Brcoke and Owen were both victims. So were Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas; all cut off before they had barely started, all greatly gifted. Of the poets who died in World War Two Keith Douglas was the most talented. He was killed in Normandy three days after D-Day, at the age of 24. Over half of the hundred or so poems included in this edition were written when Douglas was at school and university and working his way towards a personal style. His importance rests, however, on the 40odd poems written in the Middle East, mostly in 1943 after Douglas had taken part in the Battle of El Alamein and been wounded in action at Wadi Zem Zem. Exposure to battle brought about a sudden maturing of Douglas’s poetic skill. He had begun as a lyric poet, but wrote to a friend in 1943 that he would never “go back to the old forms.” “To write on the themes that have been concerning me lately in lyrical and abstract forms, would be immense bullshitting ... My object (and I don’t give a damn about my duty as a poet) is to write true things, significant things in words each of which works for its place in a line. My rhythms ... are carefully chosen to enable the poems to be read as significant speech: I see no reason to be either musical or sonorous about things at present. I suppose I reflect the

cynicism and the careful absence of expectation with which I view the world.” These phrases precisely convey the effect of the poems written in Egypt and Palestine. Typical of his mask of cool detachment, of emotion all the more powerful for being so thoroughly suppressed, is *‘How to Kill”: Now in my dial of glass appears the soldier who is going to die. his mother knows. Habits of his. his mothers knows, habits of his. The wires touch his face: I cry NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears and look, has made a man of dust of a man of flesh . . . Lyricism has not so much been eradicated from these poems as transfigured. The verbal clarity and poise of the verses enact a moral stance, a truth to experience without evasion or sentimentality. Some of the most vivid poems record with a soldier’s eye off-duty experience in cities such as Cairo: Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake, a pasty Syrian with a few words of English or the Turk who says she is a princess — she dances apparently by levitation? Or Marcelle, Parisienne always preoccupied with her dull dead lover: she has all the photographs and his letters tied in a bundle and stamped Decede in mauve ink. All this takes place in a stink of jasmine. Shortly before his death Douglas wrote in a poem that he never finished, “at times my eyes are lenses/through which the brain explores/constellations of feeling.” So clear was the lens and so sharp was the brain that these poems are as fresh as when they were written. As the quintessential voice of the desert war, and as a poet as elegant as he was tough, Douglas deserved to be much better known.