Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. I was in church a couple of weeks ago,

get over it. Just before mass started I was doing my pre-match preparations. When the priest came

walking down the centre aisle, stopped at the pew at which I knelt and slid a book along the

pew to me like a Wild West barman, my slide, a bottle of whiskey along the bar to a melancholy

gunslinger and he nodded in a way that suggested you'll like that and then on he went. And the book

that slammed into my left thigh was the fiber book of war poetry, a fat, hard back anthology.

Now no one loves a poetry anthology more than I do. I love to just sit and wallow and experience

all favorites, find some new stuff. It's, it's, oh I feel most happy and relaxed I would say.

I wouldn't normally choose, I'll be honest, anthology of war poetry. My parish priest was

once the vicar general of the British army so that might give you an inclination to why that was his

preference, that particular genre of poetry. I've always, I think like a lot of people, we have

discussed wars in these podcasts before not too long ago. In fact, we had Simon Armitage talking

of the Duke of Edinburgh's war experiences. But despite all that, when someone mentioned war

poetry, I always think of World War One. That seems to be what war poetry is to me. I don't know why

that is because you know, I've read the Iliad and the Charter of the Light Brigade and all that,

but that seems to be where a poetry lies in the modern world is World War One.

Wilfred Owen, Siegfried, Sassoon, not so World War Two. World War Two seems to be largely associated

with the Attenbaum and World War One with the Harmonica. It has a more sort of romantic feel

for a lot of people. Having said that, I once heard an unexpected public reading of a World War

Two poem, it was Henry Reeds naming of parts, which is a poem about a instructive lecture about

the various parts of an in-field rifle. And it was recited at a book launch, I went to. And the idea

of the book launch, I had a new book out myself at the time. The idea was you weren't open, you sold

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