Picture-show

These poems move with unsettling ease from masquerade and social wit to the raw aftermath of war. Sporting acquaintances, cinema heroes, lovers, and half-glimpsed strangers appear in scenes of comic sympathy, moonlit reflection, and dreamlike distance, where costume, performance, and memory blur the line between the living and the dead. Beneath the playful surface runs a haunted lyricism: butterflies, wraiths, dark houses, rain, and silence become emblems of longing, fragility, and loss. As the collection deepens, Sassoon turns his unsparing eye on war's trenches, convoys, corpses, the wounded, and the disillusioned living, exposing brutality, hypocrisy, and the corrosive damage done to language, honor, and conscience. Yet even here, dark humor, comradeship, elegy, music, and sudden beauty persist. The poems also widen into meditations on scholarship, friendship, ancient history, childhood, sleep, art, and the longing for peace, creating a book that is at once personal, morally urgent, and vividly haunted by memory. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.