Geoff Arnold

CD of the week: "Some Corner of a Foreign Field"

Because of the rehosting activity, I missed last week's CD of the week posting. I'll try to catch up...

This week's CD is a little unusual, even for me. You can't buy it in music stores, or at Amazon.com. I found it at a British goods shop in Newburyport, MA, along with the tea towels, Marmite, beer mugs, and Burbury coats. It's produced by a small company in Worton, Oxfordshire called Classical Communications, that seems to specialize in "bespoke" CDs for musems and corporate customers. It's run by a guy called Martin Souter, and this particular CD seems to have been a labour of love for him.

Some Corner of a Foreign Field is a collection of poems and music from the Great War of 1914-1918. It runs the emotional gamut, from fiercely patriotic to deeply cynical, from whimsical to heartbreaking. Some of the pieces are familiar - Kipling's Recessional, Rupert Brooke's The Soldier. Others are wholly new, at least to me - Philip Johnstone's deeply sarcastic High Wood about postwar battlefield tourism, Edward Thomas's As the team's head brass, and Eleanor Farjeon's Easter Monday. Perhaps the ones that touched me most unexpectedly were AA Milne's throwaway piece OBE and May Cannan's The Armistice.

The music consists mostly of contemporary (and hence very scratchy) recordings of such songs as We don't want to lose you (but we think you ought to go), If you were the only girl in the world (followed by the sarcastic If you were the only Bosch in the trench), A Mademoiselle from Armentiers (NOT followed by one of the ribald variations that I suspect are better known than the original), and Roses are shining in Picardy. The final sequence of poems is beautifully linked by passages from Elgar's Nimrod and Mozart's Adagio from Clarinet Concerto.

I'm not sure why this CD has grabbed me so strongly. In part, I suspect, it's because of the power of the poetry: I've always thought that the Great War galvanized a generation of poets to produce some of the finest English poetry ever written. I wonder, too, about certain similarities between the war of 90 years ago and that of today. Of course they were tremendously different; yet both wars were marked by leadership of extraordinary stupidity and vanity, and by a reckless disregard for the waste of life.

I wonder what poetry this century's folly will produce?

Posted by geoff2 at August 15, 2004 10:27 PM