It has been a long time since I’ve read a book of poems in order from front to back. It helps that Housman’s work checks in at just over fifty pages. The fact that his poems have varied, funky rhyme schemes also helps sustain the interest. But the most wonderful part of his poems is how he can weave between the bucolic scenes of the English countryside of his youth to the horrors of war and what the average young men who were sent to the Crimean and Boer fronts must have felt. It is no wonder that it has been said that more WWI British infantrymen carried this book into the trenches with them than any other save the King James Bible. More than a few died with this slim treatise in the pocket of their uniforms.
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