Above the Dreamless Dead edited by Chris Duffy

I have mixed feelings about this one. This is a slim volume that takes world war I trench poetry and repackages it with the illustrations of various Graphic Novel illustrators. The idea, I think, is to move this classic poetry into a format enticing to a younger audience.

Success for something like this is a little hard to assess. Ideally, the illustrations would enhance and illuminate the poetry giving added meaning or somehow make the inherent meaning more accessible. The risk is that the pictures distract from the meaning of the words and the beauty of the language.

Overall, I found the illustration more distracting than helpful. The effect of breaking the lines across multiple cells made the rhythms and rhyme schemes harder to follow and I often lost the thread of the poems while taking in the pictures. Additionally, because of the strong commonality of theme, the excellently drawn and painted pictures ended up rather samey even though executed by some very different artists.

I was already familiar with many of the poems, so all that really happened is I had my high opinion of Wilfred Owen confirmed and discovered that Robert Graves was older than I thought. Still, if it gets a younger generation reading these poems, than it is a worthwhile experiment.