This anthology of 101 WW1 poems brings together a wide-ranging selection of French poetry written during and in the shadow of the First World War. Presented in French with facing English translations, these poems preserve French and Belgian voices of courage, grief, comradeship, anger, irony and remembrance-voices too rarely encountered by English-language readers.

Alongside celebrated writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Émile Verhaeren are soldiers, witnesses and poets whose work has largely disappeared from view. Their subjects range from trenches, artillery batteries and military hospitals to absent lovers, ruined towns, birdsong, moonlight and the stubborn persistence of beauty.

The translations remain close to the originals while preserving their poetic movement, unusual lineation and visual experimentation. Extracts and passages are clearly identified, allowing complete poems to stand beside carefully chosen selections from longer works.

Neither a celebration of war nor a conventional historical anthology, this collection is a bilingual record of lives caught between violence and ordinary human feeling-a collection for readers of poetry, French literature and First World War history.