St Mungo's Mirrorball: Poetry Showcase 4 War

An evening focussing on the poetry during a time of war.

Alexander Hutchison will be discussing the poetry of David Jones. Hutchison is a poet and translator who writes in English and Scots. This year he has travelled to the Czech Republic and Shetland with his poems, and was booked for both StAnza and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Along with pamphlet Tardigrade (Perjink, 2013) his most recent collection is Bones and Breath (Salt, 2013).

David Jones (1895-1974) was one of the great artists and poets of the 20th Century. Jones’s work In Parenthesis, recreates his experiences as an ordinary soldier caught up in the trench warfare of WW1, was called 'a work of genius' by T.S. Eliot.

Lesley Duncan will be discussing the poetry of Charles Hamilton Sorley. Duncan is Poetry Editor of The Herald newspaper and has co-edited various volumes of poetry, most notably The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (2005) with Maurice Lindsay, and The Smeddum Test, 21st Century Poetry in Scots (2013) with Professor Alan Riach. Her own collection, Images Not Icons, was published in 2010. She has also written poetry pamphlets and her work has appeared in various anthologies
and online. Earlier this year she was made an Honorary Fellow of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.

Charles Hamilton Sorley was one of the First World War’s notable lost poets. His sonnet “When you see millions of the mouthless dead/Across your dreams in pale battalions go… “ is one of the bleakest major poems to emerge from the war, but the precocious and engaging young Scotsman (he was killed at Loos in 1915 when barely 20) also left behind other work of real merit.