Scars upon my heart

the long version

Scars upon my heart is the first anthology of women war poets of the First World War for over sixty years. The work of these eighty or so poets will come as a surprise to many. It shows, for example that women were writing protest poetry before Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and that the view of "the women at home", ignorant and idealistic, was quite false. Some of these poems come from out of direct experience of nursing the victims of trench warfare; others record the pain of lovers, brothers, sons lost. Here, as elsewhere, the "poetry is in the pity", and the anthology is a moving record of women's consciousness at a momentous period of history.