Above the Dreamless Dead

Starred review from July 21, 2014
If any poetry cries out for adaptation as sequential art, it is that of the Great War, and this anthology is an exemplary testament to this. Various artists adapt the works of some of the most famous WWI poets, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg. The talented cartoonists, including Hunt Emerson, Sarah Glidden, and Stuart Immomen, use different approaches to illuminate poems known for its bitter irony and brutal honesty. The collection is divided into three sections—“A Call To War,” “In the Trenches,” and “Aftermath”—and the adapted poems capture the horror of the Western front. For example, Kevin Huizenga’s adaptation of the Charles Sorley poem, “All the Hills and Vales Along” does an excellent job of incorporating Sorley’s sardonic take on the themes of duty and the glory of war, which characterized much pre-war poetry. Stephen R. Bissette’s adaptation of Kipling’s “The Coward” uses a unique textual arrangement to magnify the brutally laconic epitaph. The real strength of the anthology comes both from the poems selected for it and the variety of visual approaches—ranging from the cartoonish to the phantasmagoric— that prevents it from relying simply on the visual carnage of the “war to end all wars.”

August 1, 2014

Veterans of mud, blood, and ink, the British soldier Trench Poets filed dispatches from the front that rejected any romantic nobility in war and cried out against the senseless murder of millions. This collection adapts 28 poems via the black-and-white artwork of Eddie Campbell (From Hell), Carol Tyler (You'll Never Know), George Pratt (Paroles de Poilus), Peter Kuper (World War 3 Illustrated), Pat Mills (Charley's War), and other contemporary comics creators. Often, the art adds subplots or rich details. For example, a Christlike image transforms into an angel of death in "Soldiers Dream." In "Break of Dawn in the Trenches," a rat escapes the battlefield to feed her offspring underground: life goes on. Some wrenching selections become oddly beautiful through the drawings, as when glittering dew renders magical a lifeless soldier impaled on barbed wire. VERDICT This visceral and haunting compilation will help concerned readers understand the costs of war, particularly World War I, our planet's first industrialized war. A solid choice for classrooms, too, high school and up.--M.C.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2014
There's a lot that's impressive in this collection. Perhaps most impressive is how seriously the contributing artists have taken the poems they illustrate, including Hunt Emerson's raucously comical, big-nose takes on three tres vulgar soldiers' songs. George Pratt trades pen-and-ink for rollers, putty knives, and acrylic to sculpt as much as draw the charnel figures of dead soldiers for Wilfred Owen's Greater Love. Rather than illustrate Siegfried Sassoon's ruefully sarcastic The General, comics writer Garth Ennis composes an angry tribute to the Tommies, whom artist Phil Winslade draws with photorealistic accuracy. Animating a night episode from a prose work, The Great Push (1916), by Patrick MacGill, Eddie Campbell shrouds everything in Goyaesque darkness. The trekking, singing soldiers Kevin Huizenga draws for 19-year-old Charles Sorley's lines beginning All the hills and vails along could be Schultz's Peanuts gang grown tall. These and the 18 other cartoonists' portrayals of 22 further poems are equally original and evocative of the pityfearful, terrified, mournful, enragedwhich the poetry inhabited and embodied, as Owen so famously wrote. This isn't the first and won't be the last WWI poetry anthology issued during the war's centennial, but it may prove to be the most accessible and striking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)