Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 104
A Nature Book Reader
DEXTER PETLEY
Novelist, translator, angling writer
Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden
This is nature under pressure;
apple trees, birds, pike and
pasture at war between the
trenches. Undertones isn’t
generally considered a nature
book but to me it’s supreme
as such. Blunden was a
countryman and a nature
poet, a Keatsian with those
sensibilities of the Georgian
Poetry Bookshop. He goes
to war in rural France where
pastoral idyll is pulverized
into the images we are
familiar with; spikes in a sea
of mud. Blunden’s war is as
much about the denuding of
nature as it is the slaughter
of men. Undertones, muted
notes, minor keys; his
“mesmerizing detachment”
is as much rooted in rural
England as it is at Ypres
and Passchendaele. His
survival is miraclous, but
so too is the writing. The
most convincing book to
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come of out World War 1, it
is the most poetic, and in its
haunting pastoral interludes
it is the most minutely
observed recognition that
war is a rejection of the
natural harmonies of nature.
Further Reading
The Face of England
Edmund Blunden
The Man Who
Planted Trees,
by Jean Giorno
