While the photographs and letters were immediately evocative, I was all too aware that poems come of their own volition. In fact what was most difficult was finding fresh ways of writing about the first World War. Soldiers wrote detailed descriptions of the surrounding landscape, birds, plants and animals in their letters and poems. Their affinity with the natural world helped sustain them, humanising an inhuman existence; this gave me a way into the sequence. I must have heard this as a child but somehow I had forgotten, a memory erased like so many other Irish memories of the first World War.

Source: The Irish Times April 04, 2019 04:07 UTC