MICHAEL Gove’s recent attack on Oh What A Lovely War!, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder for depicting a conflict which led to 37 million civilian and military deaths as “a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite,” rather than a heroic war for “freedom,” suggests that the forthcoming anniversary of the beginning of the first world war will be a dishonest spectacle of crocodile tears and jingoism. 

And you can bet that poets will be in the firing line. 

For some reason, they are supposed to have a special access to the emotional truths of war. Every November the British media quote Wilfred Owen’s famous phrase about “the pity of war” to suggest that it is a painful but natural and unavoidable occurrence, like childbirth or death. 

And of course it allows us all to shrug and look away from the current imperialist wars being fought in our name and the knowledge that British forces have been in action somewhere in the world every year since 1914.

Thank goodness for Neil Astley and his new anthology The Hundred Years War: Modern War Poems.

It’s a hugely ambitious enterprise and a brilliant collection, with 600 pages and more than 400 poems from the first world war, the Spanish civil war, the second world war, Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, Palestine, the Lebanon, the Malvinas, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are some omissions, the most obvious being the liberation wars in Algeria, Angola, Cuba and South Africa. 

And there are some more serious absences, with nothing by Louis Aragon, Nikola Vaptsarov, Frank Thompson, Paul Eluard, Olga Berggolts, Nordahl Grieg or Konstantin Simonov and a WWII section containing far too few Soviet poets. 

But this is an anthology to be enjoyed for what it does contain, in that it features some of the greatest poets of the last 100 years — Berthold Brecht, Seamus Heaney, Boris Slutsky, Randall Jarrell, Louis MacNeice, WB Yeats and Pablo Neruda — as well as many truly great and important poems. 

Included are Miguel Hernandez’s The Wounded Man, Miklos Radnoti’s Death March, Eugenio Montale’s The Hitler Spring, Ho Thien’s The Green Beret, Tom Mcgrath’s Ode For The American Dead In Asia, Mahmoud Darwish’s In Jerusalem, Tony Harrison’s A Cold Coming and Brian Turner’s Here Bullet.

Despite the omissions, the great strength of the book is its international reach and while the section on the first world war includes the usual poems by Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon and Ilya Rosenberg, there are some powerful works from German, Italian and Russian poets.

From the war in Vietnam there are poems by US vets like Doug Anderson, Walter McDonald and Bruce Weigl and many by Vietnamese poets, notably Giang Nam, Pham Tien Duat and Pham Ho. Three Taliban poets, as well as poems by the US writer Dan O’Brien and Joseph Brodsky’s brilliant Lines On the Winter Campaign, 1980, are included in the works taken from the Afghanistan conflict.

Every reader will enjoy discovering old favourites and wonderful new poems here. 

And Gove could do with reading this book, not least for God! How I Hate You, You Young Cheerful Men! by Arthur Graeme West, who was killed by a sniper’s bullet on the western front in 1917. 

“God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men,/Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves/As soon as you are in them, nurtured up/By the salt of your corruption, and the tears/Of mothers, local vicars, college deans,/and flanked by prefaces and photographs/From all your minor poet friends — the fools —/Who paint their sentimental elegies/Where sure, no angel treads; and living, share/The dead’s brief immortality...”

The Hundred Years War: Modern War Poems is published by Bloodaxe Books, priced £12.99.