This powerful and moving anthology includes poems of war from the eighteenth century to our own days in the long shadow of the bomb. The poets evoke the glory and the horror, the exhilaration and the despair, the humanity and the insanity of war.

The selection of poems, both familiar and less so, provides an illuminating context both for the bitter denunciation of Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and for Katherine Tynan's portrayal of the First World War as necessary, just and Christian, while other poems consider the devastating impact of war on those friends, family and loved ones who remain behind.

The collection also includes works by Anne Finch, Louisa Costello, Byron, Tennyson, Kipling, Hardy, Graves, Sassoon, Brooke, Jessie Pope, May Wedderburn Cannan, Walt Whitman, Henry Reed, Adrian Mitchell and Roger McGough among many others.