Keith Douglas "How to Kill" Poem

Keith Douglas (1920-1944) was born in Tunbridge Wells, the son of a regular army officer who had won the Military Cross in World War I and who, in 1927, deserted his wife and son. Lord Byron's family situation had been somewhat similar. Interestingly both poets were men of action with an almost obsessive interest in warfare. At Merton College, Oxford, Douglas was tutored by Edmund Blunden, a distinguished soldier-poet of the World War I. In 1940, Douglas enlisted in a cavalry regiment that was soon obliged to exchange its horses for tanks. In August 1942, they went into battle against Field Marshal Rommel's Africa Corps in the Egyptian desert. Forced to remain in reserve behind the lines, Douglas commandeered a truck and, in direct disobedience of orders, drove off to join his regiment..After being sent home suffering injuries from a landmine....he eventualy returned to frontline duty and was killed in Normandy in 1944...He is considered as possibly the greatest poet of world war 2..

Regards..

Jim Clark..

All rights are reserved on this video sound recording copyright Jim Clark 2012

under the parabola of a ball, a child turning into a man, I looked into the air too long. The ball fell in my hand, it sang in the closed fist: Open Open Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears the soldier who is going to die. He smiles, and moves about in ways his mother knows, habits of his. The wires touch his face: I cry NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust of a man of flesh. This sorcery I do. Being damned, I am amused to see the centre of love diffused and the wave of love travel into vacancy. How easy it is to make a ghost.

The weightless mosquito touches her tiny shadow on the stone, and with how like, how infinite a lightness, man and shadow meet. They fuse. A shadow is a man when the mosquito death approaches