WRITER Harry Ricketts spent eight years researching some of the finest war poets and their encounters in order to write his latest book Strange Meetings: Poets of the Great War.
After some false starts and difficulty with direction, a friend introduced Ricketts to A Chance Meeting, a book by American author Rachel Cohen. Rickett’s war poet jigsaw puzzle suddenly made sense.
“I read this book and I had already been collecting meetings between the poets so I realised they could be the narrative,” says Ricketts, who has published numerous books including Talking About Ourselves - a book of interviews with NZ poets.
“I suddenly worked out the structure – it was a big breakthrough.”
Ricketts spent hours gathering information about war poets including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves and their encounters creating this “group biography” or “series of linked short stories”. From there the title was easy: Strange Meeting is a famous poem by Owen.
“The book is about friends and infatuations and fallings out,” he says.
For instance, Sassoon and Owen met at a shell shock treatment hospital (Craiglockhart War Hospital) in autumn 1917. At first, Sassoon didn’t think much of Owen’s poetry because he didn’t write about the war, so Sassoon encouraged him to write about it.
“Sassoon tried to write beautifully before the war but he was not very good at it. He had talent for colloquialisms and direct speech. He’s weird because it [the war] brought out the best in him,” Ricketts says.
“It’s funny because now Owen is considered ‘the war poet’ but Sassoon had a lot to do with that.”
The book documents both real and “imaginative” encounters between the poets, such as Ivor Gurney’s story.
Edward Thomas’ widow Helen visited Gurney (who was a fan of Thomas’ poetry) when he was in an asylum. She brought Thomas’ Gloucestershire tramping maps to show Gurney and left an “amazing” account of the visit. Ricketts found the maps in Cardiff Library.
“It was like solving something. It gave me goosebumps,” he says.
“These days poets go to a Creative Writing Class but in the day they would meet each other.
Ricketts spent four days in a New York library transcribing Sassoon’s often critical annotations of a review copy of Graves’ book Goodbye To All That, an important process for Ricketts who says that the relationship between a writer and their reader is based on trust through accurate research.
“I tried to include something in every chapter that an expert may say ‘oh, I didn’t know that’ – like Edward Thomas’ tramping maps,” he says.
Working these finds into a book took place between Ricketts’ teaching stints at Victoria University. While studying English at Oxford University, Ricketts became interested in the poetry of WWI after a surge of public interest, and the publication of two anthologies, in the 1960s.
“Years later these poems are still saying what we felt or wanted to feel,’ he says.
Last year, the book was released internationally in time for Armistice Day on November 11. Its local NZ release is next week.
Strange Meetings: Poets of the Great War, Vicbooks, Victoria University Student Union Building, 5.30pm-7pm, March 23.