
Steve Whitaker, Literary Editor
Poem Of The Week: Vera, Waiting By Shash Trevett
Vera, Waiting
She had prepared for a telegram
prepared for what she would say
to the Post Office boy. Prepared
her retreat to her room, to slit open
the envelope and allow the news
to make a sortie into her mind.
An assault anticipated.
Yet when the news came, it was by telephone.
And she was in Brighton, not Buxton –
her dug-out two hundred miles away –
her parapet bare of barbed wire.
And as the mud of Louvencourt
silted over his body, her life zig-zagged
out of control and she realised
that what she had thought possible
was now a sap abandoned in no-man’s land.
A collapsed line soon to be overrun
in a soil which would always smell
of sweat and blood, and of violets
dying in Ploegsteert Wood.
Shash Trevett’s fine poem divulges, in metaphors of military conflict, as much information as the reader needs to construct a context. And if the circumstances of Vera Brittain’s life, or the subsequent cinematic representation of her seminal book, Testament of Youth, remain obscure for many, Trevett’s great skill lies in the construction of a paradigm of loss out of the wreckage of a relationship sundered at Louvencourt at Christmas 1915.
For the tokens of Vera Brittain’s memory – the death of her fiancée, Roland Leighton, on the Somme and the extraordinary prescience of some of his poems – may be magnified into symbols, of a wider national, even international, sense of grief. Premonition is, or was, infectious: Trevett’s skilled overlap of time and place in ‘Vera, Waiting’ inveigles a sense of the embattled present into her narrative – the ‘sortie’ and ‘assault’ of possibility give prior notice of an unbearable truth, learned two hundred miles nearer to the Front in Brighton, and almost within echoing distance of the shellfire. The narrator’s tortured syntax – ‘her parapet bare of barbed wire’ – draws her subject further into a mire of abandonment and derangement.
Vera Brittain’s grief is well documented, as is her consequent decision to join the VAD as a nurse, to be nearer the realm of so much suffering. Her sensitivity to the landscape, to its wounds and sinews, is also magnified in the narrator’s rendering: a crystalline version of one of Leighton’s prophetic poems, Trevett’s final four lines conjure the sight, the smell, and the enormous symbolic significance of one corner of Flanders – known to the Tommies in the vernacular, ‘Plug Street Wood’ – in the ironically enduring image of a dying violet.
‘Vera, Waiting’ is taken from The Naming of Names and is published by The Poetry Business (2024)
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