Sunday, May 16, 2021

"How can cosmopolitan sympathies persist in times of heightened nationalism? The chapter on Isaac Rosenberg and the poetry of World War I shows that a poem like “Break of Day in the Trenches” delicately illuminates the transnational commonalities between soldiers, in defiance of political and national divisions. No-Man’s Land provokes in Rosenberg a desire for the “pleasure / To cross the sleeping green between”. Such a reading will not surprise readers of the poetry of World War I; instead, Ramazani’s achievement is to incorporate such conclusions in a broader approach to poetry." Justin Quinn • Dublin Review of Books