Review of Mood Indigo - Sam Smith Nov 2024
Wendy Klein and I did a book swap. Let Battle Commence was not as anticipated: this is a very big little book, its literary weight worthy of the angst that went into its making, the title as readily descriptive of the Shall-I? Should-I? girding of loins prior to Wendy addressing her family’s past.
War poems have long become a genre all their own. Anti-war poems especially. Rudyard Kipling even, while beloved of the warmongering right, still excoriated post-war British governments with his Tommy-this and Tommy-that. A neglect of ex-service personnel that continues to this day. Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, although seeming to glorify heroism, served more to demonstrate war’s waste and futility. Indeed it is hard to find a writer who does glorify war. Even that old macho Hemingway compiled one of the best anthologies of war writing, of what it is like to be actually under fire, even featuring Stendhal on the Napoleonic wars.
Wendy has followed in that appalled-by-war literary tradition with her poems based on her great grandfather’s letters home from within the US civil war. Generally the collection is one long reconciliation, her long ago grandparent having been fighting for the Confederates, and thus supporting slavery, and her being of this 21st century’s cosmopolitan culture.
Hers is a clear-eyed view of the past, and as importantly of the imperfect present. She manages to convey a familial empathy for her ancient relatives, while being both appalled by her great grandfather’s cause and his wartime predicaments. The opening poem for instance is in the spirit of the aforementioned Kipling poem, but hers as an old-fashioned newspaper vendor shouting out the headlines, which serve to detail the killing innovations made during that civil war.
I find myself reluctant to quote any single poem here as each contributes to the whole and any one would be an imperfect example. The collection could also be called one long lament wherein she bemoans the ancestry of modern day weapons too. Recounted with no illusions she tries to forgive her forebears, their being of a time and place, but yet… We are none of us now perfect, and what will the future make of us? Us with our ongoing wars?
I don’t think I’ve come across a poetry collection like this before, one that goes to such depths to avoid easy judgements. As conflicted as Walt Whitman’s accounts of nursing in that war, Wendy Klein’s inner turmoil is what makes this book so big, that gives it such a density, the wanting to be proud, admitting to the shame, embracing her ancestors’ humanity, her reluctance to judge while knowing that she ought to and yet… and yet.
To Read Brian Docherty's Review in London Grip click here