The First World War marked the bloody heyday of war poetry. The combination of a highly literate fighting force and long periods of enforced inactivity and conditions of extreme horror produced poetry of a quality and quantity that will never (perhaps mercifully) be equalled.

Will another Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon emerge from the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq? I doubt it. The blog, and not the poem, is the preferred word-weapon of today's soldier. Yet contemporary war poetry is being written, albeit seldom by those at the front. The wars in which we are mired have each lasted longer than the First World War, and war has been woven grimly into the national consciousness.

“It could be argued,” writes Simon Armitage, that “the permanent backdrop of our current military situation makes almost every poem a war poem”. The Not Dead is Armitage's brilliant and painful evocation of the pity of modern warfare, less concerned with the blood and bullets of the battlefield than the carnage left behind in soldiers' minds.

The “Not Dead” are the surviving soldiers, broken in mind and body, uncelebrated, invisible and ignored. Armitage's anger is reminiscent of Tommy, Rudyard Kipling's poem condemning the casual civilian disdain for the humble squaddie:

We are morbidly ill.
Soldiers with nothing but time to kill,
we idle now in everyday clothes and ordinary towns,
blowing up, breaking down.

The poems in this collection were written for the film of the same name, a collaboration with the director Brian Hill exploring the lives of returning soldiers, that was broadcast last year on Remembrance Sunday.

Each poem in this collection is a vivid little biography: the UN “blue lid” in Bosnia, haunted by the killers he waved through his checkpoint on their way to murder; the veteran of the Malayan Emergency taken from an oily Manchester canal to a burning river in the jungle; the Iraq war infantryman who must patrol, every day, over the “blood-shadow” left by the corpse of the looter he shot.

These are poems about what happens when the heat of battle gives way to the brutal chill of a Home Front, where the home fires do not burn.

The Not Dead by Simon Armitage
Pomona, £6.99; 80pp Buy the book

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