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Pink Mist
From the author of I Saw a Man comes a powerful drama in verse that captures both the trauma of modern warfare and the difficulty of transitioning back to normal life after combat.
In early 2008, three young friends from Bristol decide to join the army and are deployed to the conflict in Afghanistan. Within a short space of time the three men return to the women in their lives—a wife, a mother, a girlfriend—all of whom must now share the psychological and physical aftershocks of military service. Written from the points of view of each soldier, Sheers explores not only their experiences in the field of battle, but also the grueling process of recovery following a debilitating injury, the strain of PTSD on a new marriage, and the emotional toll of survivor's guilt among soldiers and their loved ones at home.
Drawing on interviews with soldiers and their families, Pink Mist illuminates the enduring human cost of war and its all too often devastating effect upon the young lives pulled into its orbit. A work of great dramatic power, documentary integrity, and emotional intensity.
In early 2008, three young friends from Bristol decide to join the army and are deployed to the conflict in Afghanistan. Within a short space of time the three men return to the women in their lives—a wife, a mother, a girlfriend—all of whom must now share the psychological and physical aftershocks of military service. Written from the points of view of each soldier, Sheers explores not only their experiences in the field of battle, but also the grueling process of recovery following a debilitating injury, the strain of PTSD on a new marriage, and the emotional toll of survivor's guilt among soldiers and their loved ones at home.
Drawing on interviews with soldiers and their families, Pink Mist illuminates the enduring human cost of war and its all too often devastating effect upon the young lives pulled into its orbit. A work of great dramatic power, documentary integrity, and emotional intensity.
112 pages, Hardcover
First published June 4, 2013
9 people are currently reading
730 people want to read
About the author
Owen Sheers
27 books140 followersOWEN SHEERS is a poet, author and playwright. His first novel, Resistance, was translated into ten languages and adapted into a film. The Dust Diaries, his Zimbabwean nonfiction narrative, won the Wales Book of the Year Award. His awards for poetry and drama include the Somerset Maugham Award for Skirrid Hill, the Hay Festival Medal for Poetry and Wales Book of the Year Award for Pink Mist, and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award for his play The Two Worlds of Charlie F. His most recent novel is I Saw a Man, which was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Etranger. He lives in Wales with his wife and daughter. He has been a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow and is currently Professor in Creativity at Swansea University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
June 5, 2017
A drama written in verse about three British boys who join up the army and are sent to Afghanistan that explores the aftermath of warfare and the effect on those who they left behind. The poetry part was a little hit and miss for me but most of the rhythm was really good, and the imagery was really good especially in the one verse that gave the book its name where Lisa is talking about Taff's time in the war. Lisa had some pretty good lines in general. The subject matter felt exaggerate when reading but I kept in mind that the whole point of this is that it's supposed to be performed and I do think that it was good and it would be even better if you get to see it actually being performed, especially because hearing poetry is so different from the act of just reading it.
May 13, 2017
Owen Sheers is a Welsh poet and novelist. I was intrigued with his novel "I Saw A Man". It created controversy among readers......for many good reasons. I knew I wanted to read Owen Sheers again.
"Pink Mist" captures both the trauma of modern warfare and the difficulty of transitioning back to normal life after combat.
In early 2008, three men: Arthur, Hads, and Taff, from Bristol join the army and are deployed to the conflict in Afghanistan. Their wife, mother, and girlfriend share the psychological and physical aftershocks of military service.
It's written from each of the three soldiers points of view -- "Pink Mist", not only explores the experiences on the field of battle, but also the grueling process of recovery following a debilitating injury, The strain of PTSD and a new marriage and the emotional toll of survivors guilt among soldiers and their love ones.
We see the cost of war. This isn't an anti war book - but anybody considering joining the army might want to read this.
Owen doesn't take any position one way or another - by writing a drama verse - we see exactly what there is to see.
War has a devastating effect among the young people pulled into it. There is a powerful YouTube of this book- done in black and white film on the internet. I would post the link if I knew how. If interested- it's not hard to find.... or maybe my friend Iris ...or another Goodreads member will find it and post it in a comment.
Very important- well written .... glad I read it.....and I'm still hoping Owen Sheers has a new novel out soon!
"Pink Mist" captures both the trauma of modern warfare and the difficulty of transitioning back to normal life after combat.
In early 2008, three men: Arthur, Hads, and Taff, from Bristol join the army and are deployed to the conflict in Afghanistan. Their wife, mother, and girlfriend share the psychological and physical aftershocks of military service.
It's written from each of the three soldiers points of view -- "Pink Mist", not only explores the experiences on the field of battle, but also the grueling process of recovery following a debilitating injury, The strain of PTSD and a new marriage and the emotional toll of survivors guilt among soldiers and their love ones.
We see the cost of war. This isn't an anti war book - but anybody considering joining the army might want to read this.
Owen doesn't take any position one way or another - by writing a drama verse - we see exactly what there is to see.
War has a devastating effect among the young people pulled into it. There is a powerful YouTube of this book- done in black and white film on the internet. I would post the link if I knew how. If interested- it's not hard to find.... or maybe my friend Iris ...or another Goodreads member will find it and post it in a comment.
Very important- well written .... glad I read it.....and I'm still hoping Owen Sheers has a new novel out soon!
March 16, 2025
My heart aches, my eyes cannot stop pouring rain and I just cannot tell you how much this book touched me.
It deals with very heavy topics such as grief, war service it just aghhh
It was amazing you guys.. it will stay with me for a loong loong time.
Loved it even though it broke me.
It deals with very heavy topics such as grief, war service it just aghhh
It was amazing you guys.. it will stay with me for a loong loong time.
Loved it even though it broke me.
July 1, 2017
I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway.
I don't read plays/screenplays often, and I didn't realize this was going to be one - but I was surprised to find that I could follow the story without those details. Or maybe this is some sort of radio show, because there wasn't any movement. It was all just dialogue. Anyways, I went into this thinking it was a novel and thinking it was going to be something like that scary movie, The Mist - which it sure as heck wasn't. This book was about four kids in war (the decision, why they came home, and how that affected them/their family). Pretty powerful, especially why Arthur must come home, in the end.
Pink Mist took me a bit to get into, maybe ten pages, which isn't bad in a novel, but this was only 81 pages or something like that, so ten pages is significant. Also, although I enjoyed it, this is not something I will come back to, so, three stars.
I don't read plays/screenplays often, and I didn't realize this was going to be one - but I was surprised to find that I could follow the story without those details. Or maybe this is some sort of radio show, because there wasn't any movement. It was all just dialogue. Anyways, I went into this thinking it was a novel and thinking it was going to be something like that scary movie, The Mist - which it sure as heck wasn't. This book was about four kids in war (the decision, why they came home, and how that affected them/their family). Pretty powerful, especially why Arthur must come home, in the end.
Pink Mist took me a bit to get into, maybe ten pages, which isn't bad in a novel, but this was only 81 pages or something like that, so ten pages is significant. Also, although I enjoyed it, this is not something I will come back to, so, three stars.
September 18, 2021
a strong four stars. with simple but evocative dialogue, the book effectively shows the enduring trauma of war on three young soldiers and their loved ones in just over 80 pages. the author interviewed a number of soldiers and their families to write the book, and i think that authenticity comes out in the details of the experiences and emotions described. was written as a play, and i do think it would probably be strongest when performed, but the text itself works pretty well on its own.
August 30, 2015
The futility of war and its consequences. Heartbreaking and poignant.Powerful and harrowing.Needs to be read by everyone.Wilfred Owen,Owen Sheers,
consecutive intervals both saying the same thing.And what will we do about it? Probably nothing,until the next war and the next poet.And even then probably nothing.As an intelligent species? we are a little slow to catch on about our own self destruction through conflict and war
Pink Mist tells us we all bleed red.
November 4, 2016
"Pink mist. That's what they call it.
When one of your mates hasn't just bought it,
but goes in a flash, from being there to not.
A direct hit. An IED. An RPG stuck in the gut.
However it happens you open your eyes
and that's all they are.
A fine spray of pink, delicate mist
as if some genie has granted a wish.
There, and then not.
A dirty trick you pray isn't true.
White heat. Code red. Pink mist.
Blue on blue on blue."
When one of your mates hasn't just bought it,
but goes in a flash, from being there to not.
A direct hit. An IED. An RPG stuck in the gut.
However it happens you open your eyes
and that's all they are.
A fine spray of pink, delicate mist
as if some genie has granted a wish.
There, and then not.
A dirty trick you pray isn't true.
White heat. Code red. Pink mist.
Blue on blue on blue."
arcs-to-review
November 9, 2016
September 4, 2016
Brilliant. There is nothing glamorous about war.
August 13, 2017
This is perfect in every way.
It's on a theatre tour in the UK atm...GO.
Never cried at a play/book/radio play all in one before hahhaa.
It's on a theatre tour in the UK atm...GO.
Never cried at a play/book/radio play all in one before hahhaa.
August 4, 2016
I got through this in one sitting, late at night, whispering it aloud after having heard Owen Sheers read from it at an event. Pink Mist is definitely a poem that you get most out of by hearing, and I think it would be stunningly powerful to see or listen to it being performed.
The verse poem tells the story of three lads from Bristol who join the army and are sent to Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. I found it convincing and noted that it is based on Sheers' interviews with soldiers and their families. Experiences and personal responses came through clearly and poignantly in the poem, which offered insight into a way of life that is otherwise quite alien to me. Occasionally the poetic devices or motifs felt a bit blunt or indulgent – the eggs, for example – or the voices not quite authentic, though in general Sheers' ability to marry everyday speech and 'poetry' without compromising either amazed me. I enjoyed the depiction of Bristol but if you don't have a basic familiarity with the city, this might create distracting questions (similarly, a couple of military terms or acronyms I wasn't sure I understood weren't in the glossary, and I found it broke the flow of the poem to stop and look these up).
Pink Mist is an important portrayal of modern warfare and its impact on young servicemen (and servicewomen, though they don't really feature), their partners and families, and their encounters with, and impressions of, civilians living in war zones. I will read it again, perhaps alongside some older war poetry. In particular, there were three parts I found very haunting:
• Taff's wife's comparison of her husband, returned from Afghanistan, with their young son, and living with them as mothering two children, except her son never 'stared into my eyes, soaked with sweat, / looking at something countries away. / Tom didn't have the last year of his life / flashing like a trailer across his mind all day'
• the 'two plastic chairs, / empty, lit up by the fires, / turning reddish brown and purple red' with 'pink mist' (I didn't know what this was, and if you don't either, learn the term through the poem rather than looking it up first)
• the 'Rose Cottage' at Camp Bastion and Staff Sergeants Andy and Tom tending to soldiers 'like two maids making a bed'.
I'd be very interested to learn how this poem is received by people with personal experience of military service, or those close to them.
The verse poem tells the story of three lads from Bristol who join the army and are sent to Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. I found it convincing and noted that it is based on Sheers' interviews with soldiers and their families. Experiences and personal responses came through clearly and poignantly in the poem, which offered insight into a way of life that is otherwise quite alien to me. Occasionally the poetic devices or motifs felt a bit blunt or indulgent – the eggs, for example – or the voices not quite authentic, though in general Sheers' ability to marry everyday speech and 'poetry' without compromising either amazed me. I enjoyed the depiction of Bristol but if you don't have a basic familiarity with the city, this might create distracting questions (similarly, a couple of military terms or acronyms I wasn't sure I understood weren't in the glossary, and I found it broke the flow of the poem to stop and look these up).
Pink Mist is an important portrayal of modern warfare and its impact on young servicemen (and servicewomen, though they don't really feature), their partners and families, and their encounters with, and impressions of, civilians living in war zones. I will read it again, perhaps alongside some older war poetry. In particular, there were three parts I found very haunting:
• Taff's wife's comparison of her husband, returned from Afghanistan, with their young son, and living with them as mothering two children, except her son never 'stared into my eyes, soaked with sweat, / looking at something countries away. / Tom didn't have the last year of his life / flashing like a trailer across his mind all day'
• the 'two plastic chairs, / empty, lit up by the fires, / turning reddish brown and purple red' with 'pink mist' (I didn't know what this was, and if you don't either, learn the term through the poem rather than looking it up first)
• the 'Rose Cottage' at Camp Bastion and Staff Sergeants Andy and Tom tending to soldiers 'like two maids making a bed'.
I'd be very interested to learn how this poem is received by people with personal experience of military service, or those close to them.
June 7, 2013
This is a MUST READ for anyone with interests or involvement in,or concerns for our contemporary world and its violence . Owen Sheers is a novelist, screenwriter, dramatist and one of the very best poets writing today.
"Pink Mist" is a dramatic poem. That categorisation should not turn anyone away from it. It is a brilliant and wonderful book. It tells the story of three young Bristol lads who join the army. They are sent to Afghanistan. We hear their words and share their thoughts, and the words and thoughts of three women: the mother of one, a wife and a girlfriend. Owen Sheers presents a truly powerful scenario, but the poem is not a polemic; not "anti-war". But it is a devastating story of Arthur, Hads and Taff - not only of their horrific experiences in the war but also of feeling so alien when coming home.
A brief quote: Pink Mist. That's what they call it.
When one of your mates hasn't just bought it,
But goes in a flash, from being there to not.
"Pink Mist" is a dramatic poem. That categorisation should not turn anyone away from it. It is a brilliant and wonderful book. It tells the story of three young Bristol lads who join the army. They are sent to Afghanistan. We hear their words and share their thoughts, and the words and thoughts of three women: the mother of one, a wife and a girlfriend. Owen Sheers presents a truly powerful scenario, but the poem is not a polemic; not "anti-war". But it is a devastating story of Arthur, Hads and Taff - not only of their horrific experiences in the war but also of feeling so alien when coming home.
A brief quote: Pink Mist. That's what they call it.
When one of your mates hasn't just bought it,
But goes in a flash, from being there to not.
December 28, 2015
I started and finished this book on the train journey home. I was already quite emotional, I was going home for the first time in six months. I read the first four chapters between Bath and Newport. Luckily I had to change at Newport so I had time to compose myself. The first four chapters were brilliantly told, the verse adding so much more to the story, and the characters well developed.
Back on the train at Newport, I read the final chapter before I reached Cardiff and I cried so hard people were giving me funny looks. I had guessed what was going to happen, there were clues, but that last chapter, brilliant, heartbreaking, beautiful. I can't wait to start another book by Owen Sheets!
Back on the train at Newport, I read the final chapter before I reached Cardiff and I cried so hard people were giving me funny looks. I had guessed what was going to happen, there were clues, but that last chapter, brilliant, heartbreaking, beautiful. I can't wait to start another book by Owen Sheets!
June 25, 2017
What a poignantly written piece. I will never look at veterans the same. How often did I hear little boys say, "Who wants to play war?" when I was growing up. It's never the aftermath we are prepared for when they return from the realities of war. This story of three friends, Arthur, Hads, and Taff that go off to war will be with you long after you put the book down. It's short but packs a powerful emotional punch. The next time I see a veteran, I'll take a little more time. I won this book in a goodreads giveaway.
April 20, 2015
Could not put it down! I read this in a few hours and have since read it over and over again. Pink Mist is a compelling and tragic tale of three young boys who make the life changing decision to join the army. Sheers highlights the devastating effects that war has on the soldiers and their loved ones through events of confusion and loss. The way this verse drama is written is beautifully honest. I feel Sheers depicts modern day war perfectly, one of the best things I've read in a LONG time!
December 5, 2018
A very well written book that really packs a punch in only 83 pages. It's really looks at the realities of war and there were so many things that struck home like how when there is a fight with gunfire, the brain won't remember exactly what went down but will remember the garden chair that's burning. I loved the poetic nature of it, it flowed gracefully but strongly portrayed the truth of war. Very impressive.
July 16, 2013
I don't read as much poetry as I'd like but wow. This was definitely worth the read. Like the quote says on the front cover, it really does remind me of Wilfred Owen. The fact it was a verse-drama made it very easy to read and added substance to what it meant. And the theme of being deployed to Afghanistan was excellently portrayed. Definitely recommend it!
March 27, 2020
An absolute heart-wrenching play that you’ll no doubt carry with you forever.
The words flow in way that’s beautiful and poetic, and it’s difficult not to read the whole script in one sitting.
I loved using one of the monologues from this in my A-Level drama, and i’ll always remember how vividly it put me in the headspace of the characters in the play.
The words flow in way that’s beautiful and poetic, and it’s difficult not to read the whole script in one sitting.
I loved using one of the monologues from this in my A-Level drama, and i’ll always remember how vividly it put me in the headspace of the characters in the play.
August 10, 2014
This is a remarkable book of poetic dialogue of young men returned from the Iraq War. When reading you can hear the voices for ever. Homer and Beowulf those ancient voices resonate. Can't forget these young guys! To be read aloud and listened.
July 18, 2016
This is an interesting book to read about PTSD and the real experiences of soldiers. It has a sort of prose script style which leaves a lot of things somewhat ambiguous, but works incredibly well in the book's context.
October 29, 2014
Just finished @owensheers' Pink Mist. Single sitting stuff. Raw, poignant, lucid and as smooth as ermine. Read it. Now.
August 12, 2016
Easily the best thing I've read about modern warfare. Devoured it in a day. Get a box of tissues and get reading.
February 18, 2017
Such a beautifully written Drama-poem about the war in Afghanistan.
I'm not going to tell you anymore as I feel that one as I did should read this book without knowing what's going to happen in it
I'm not going to tell you anymore as I feel that one as I did should read this book without knowing what's going to happen in it
May 8, 2018
A must read. Very enjoyable and sad and heartbreaking all in one...
September 25, 2022
ok fine maybe my lit teacher was right. war books CAN be good
March 21, 2024
read it once. didn’t like it. read it again because I thought i just didn’t get it. still didn’t like it
March 10, 2014
Excepting Sassoon, Brooke and Owen can you name one other war poet? Where are all the great WWII poets and the Vietnam War poets? Did the First World War poets have the last word on what’s wrong with war? Actually, no. But Owen’s verse in particular tempered a new, gritty realism—gone are the heroics that typified epics likes Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’—with a degree of romanticism which made the truth of his poetry palatable, memorable and hard to better.
A century on the mechanics and vocabulary of warfare may have changed but has its essence? No. ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is as relevant as it was in 1917 but who takes Latin nowadays? Pink Mist says nothing essentially new but couches it in language the Facebook generation will get. Likely in another hundred years it’ll need updating again.
Where it differs from what’s gone before is that it concentrates on the aftermath, how war affects both soldiers and their families. The book focuses on “three friends who’d once linked arms at school/ …chanting like fools,/ Who wants to play war?” But when the opportunity presents itself they enlist for all the wrong reasons: there’re no decent jobs in Bristol and the ads are just too tempting. They do a lot of growing up in the six weeks tour in Afghanistan: Taff, “the army made him./ But then they broke him too”; Hads, cut “down from six foot two to four foot three” and Arthur who returned seemingly unscathed but wound up going back “to hurt someone,/ to satisfy that hunger/ before [he] missed his chance.” None of them “come home proper from the war:”
A century on the mechanics and vocabulary of warfare may have changed but has its essence? No. ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is as relevant as it was in 1917 but who takes Latin nowadays? Pink Mist says nothing essentially new but couches it in language the Facebook generation will get. Likely in another hundred years it’ll need updating again.
Where it differs from what’s gone before is that it concentrates on the aftermath, how war affects both soldiers and their families. The book focuses on “three friends who’d once linked arms at school/ …chanting like fools,/ Who wants to play war?” But when the opportunity presents itself they enlist for all the wrong reasons: there’re no decent jobs in Bristol and the ads are just too tempting. They do a lot of growing up in the six weeks tour in Afghanistan: Taff, “the army made him./ But then they broke him too”; Hads, cut “down from six foot two to four foot three” and Arthur who returned seemingly unscathed but wound up going back “to hurt someone,/ to satisfy that hunger/ before [he] missed his chance.” None of them “come home proper from the war:”
ARTHURAs a verse-drama Pink Mist was written to be performed and has been on Radio 4. It utilises common language, some dialect and a few specialist terms that necessitate the inclusion of a glossary so the poetry fades into the background a little from time to time but not entirely as this extract shows:
But I did come back. I did.
GWEN
No you didn’t. Not Arthur anyhow.
Some other bloke, perhaps. But not my man.
Pink mist. That's what they call it.One of several powerful images that will stay with you. The language isn’t as catchy as Owen’s but I can imagine this being performed in English classes and holding the kids’ attentions plus the girls are certainly not left with nothing to say; they provide important counterpoint. I can certainly see this on the syllabus in a few years. Alongside Owen, a suitable complement.
When one of your mates hasn't just bought it,
but goes in a flash, from being there to not.
A direct hit. An IED. An RPG stuck in the gut.
However it happens you open your eyes
and that's all they are.
A fine spray of pink, a delicate mist
as if some genie has granted a wish.
There, and then not.
A dirty trick you pray isn't true.
White heat. Code red. Pink mist.
June 18, 2018
Who Wants To Play War?
The testosterone-fuelled ambitions of three young Bristol men, Hads, Taff and Arthur to enlist in the Army are dramatized in sparse detail. The verse-drama form works well with dislocated voices seeking solidarity of purpose in training and war, but the brokenness and bleakness of the Afghanistan battlefields keeps the three tunnelled and obscured from the reader as well as from spotlight of political commentary. The drama of their fates must speak to us on its own terms, while the poetry struggles with the trauma, amputation and death in the metaphor of the mist. The 'fine spray of pink, a delicate mist as if some genie had granted a wish. There, and then not' makes the muscular physicality of bondsmen in battle after weeks of training in Catterick something worthless, annihilating in its finality. But even for the two survivors, it doesn't end there. The reader is taken beyond 'the burns and the hallucinations' into 'something the surgeons couldn't reach', beyond even the misty spaces of incredulity and 'pity' of Wilfred Owen's war a hundred years before. Where do we end up? With Hads and his insistence that 'you have to count the blessing, not the curse,' and then face the amputated, traumatised reality of a community that's lost its balance as the voices of the dead watch and whisper to the bereaved from the hills above the town. Anyone want to come out and listen to the fireworks, boys?
The testosterone-fuelled ambitions of three young Bristol men, Hads, Taff and Arthur to enlist in the Army are dramatized in sparse detail. The verse-drama form works well with dislocated voices seeking solidarity of purpose in training and war, but the brokenness and bleakness of the Afghanistan battlefields keeps the three tunnelled and obscured from the reader as well as from spotlight of political commentary. The drama of their fates must speak to us on its own terms, while the poetry struggles with the trauma, amputation and death in the metaphor of the mist. The 'fine spray of pink, a delicate mist as if some genie had granted a wish. There, and then not' makes the muscular physicality of bondsmen in battle after weeks of training in Catterick something worthless, annihilating in its finality. But even for the two survivors, it doesn't end there. The reader is taken beyond 'the burns and the hallucinations' into 'something the surgeons couldn't reach', beyond even the misty spaces of incredulity and 'pity' of Wilfred Owen's war a hundred years before. Where do we end up? With Hads and his insistence that 'you have to count the blessing, not the curse,' and then face the amputated, traumatised reality of a community that's lost its balance as the voices of the dead watch and whisper to the bereaved from the hills above the town. Anyone want to come out and listen to the fireworks, boys?
January 28, 2017
Fantastic. Verse drama about the impact of three young Britons' decision to join up and go to Afghanistan.
Some of Sheers' writing resonates with and is influenced by ancient Welsh poetry:
It was January,
snow pitchen on the Severn,
turning e brown mud white,
fishermen blowing their fingerless gloves,
the current pulling their fishing lines tight.
That's how it was the morning when
the three of us did what boys always have
And left our homes for war.
But he also seamlessly weaves in modern vernacular, for example as he describes the bored, boozy night out that prompts one young man to sign up, "the Friday carrot at the end of the stick", and the moment he visualized himself in the place of the soldier's image on a recruitment poster:
We'd been out on the piss and we're going for a kebab
when some scutler of Hads' stopped in her tracks,
bent double and flashing her tramp-stamp,
chucked up her guts.
Some of Sheers' writing resonates with and is influenced by ancient Welsh poetry:
It was January,
snow pitchen on the Severn,
turning e brown mud white,
fishermen blowing their fingerless gloves,
the current pulling their fishing lines tight.
That's how it was the morning when
the three of us did what boys always have
And left our homes for war.
But he also seamlessly weaves in modern vernacular, for example as he describes the bored, boozy night out that prompts one young man to sign up, "the Friday carrot at the end of the stick", and the moment he visualized himself in the place of the soldier's image on a recruitment poster:
We'd been out on the piss and we're going for a kebab
when some scutler of Hads' stopped in her tracks,
bent double and flashing her tramp-stamp,
chucked up her guts.
March 4, 2020
"Like" is a hard thing to say when you read something that shreds your heart. Reminiscent of warrior poems from ages past, I am reminded of Ellis Humphrey Evans, Wilfred Owen, Keith Douglas, Walt Whitman and John Greenleaf Whittier. War is terrible, in any era and Owen Sheers does his part to remind this current generation of that.
"Who wants to play war?
Who wants to play war?
We'd said 'us',
I'd made sure of that.
And now we had.
But this - saying goodbye to Gwen, again.
This wasn't in the brochure.
Or the worry on the face of my mum,
or the thickening of tears in my chest
as I looked out the window
and saw them both waving,
and Gwen still crying,
as if that, a disappearing bus,
was the last they'd ever see of me.
Which it was."
"Who wants to play war?
Who wants to play war?
We'd said 'us',
I'd made sure of that.
And now we had.
But this - saying goodbye to Gwen, again.
This wasn't in the brochure.
Or the worry on the face of my mum,
or the thickening of tears in my chest
as I looked out the window
and saw them both waving,
and Gwen still crying,
as if that, a disappearing bus,
was the last they'd ever see of me.
Which it was."
Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews