<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    BEHIND THE LINES

Rosenberg was a playwright too. The poetry, tinged with autobiography -- Bristol-born Rosenberg, who was killed on 1 April 1918 [read a biography], was one of London's east end Jewish immigrants -- has a particular raw directness :

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies ...

(those rats again! -- compare Jones and Sassoon) or The Immortals (one of two antodes to lice) :

I used to think the Devil hid
In women's smiles and wine's carouse.
I call'd him Satan, Balzebub.
But now I call him dirty louse.

or his best known, Dead Man's Dump :

A man's brains spattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face.

Continue >>