The Poetry of Remembrance: Words and Music Remembrance Evening

Mrs Davis and her squad of singers and readers did extraordinary justice to the desperate poetry of the First World War.  This was no helter-skelter parade of these you have loved, but a much more deeply considered and richly analysed contemplation of lives and words torn from barely imaginable circumstances.  And it is this: the impossibility of placing ourselves, the reader or listener, anywhere near the action, in imagination let alone reality, that adds power to their evocation.  Tragic stories, such as Wilfred Owens’, add extra poignancy but in themselves should not encourage us to admire the poetry out of pity or duty.  No, this, for Mrs Davis, and for her audience, is poetry of the highest order regardless of its setting, of glory lost, or of hope deceived.