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- Iain Bell
The Undying Splendour (2007)
- Chester Music Ltd (World)
Programme Note
The brutality of the First World War inspired some of the most vivid accounts of the battlefield to-date, making poets of many of the young men who had enlisted to fight. Among them stands Sergeant John William Streets from Whitwell, Derbyshire who served with the 12th Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment. He died on the Somme while going to the aid of a fellow wounded soldier. His anthology of poems, ‘The Undying Splendour’ was published posthumously. The selected verses depict the internal journey of a soldier. Firstly fresh-faced, he meditates on the presence of a lark carolling above the trenches but is all too soon aware of the carnage about him as countless comrades are laid to rest. In the third and final poem, war-weary yet more philosophical in mood, he ponders on the place that he and the fallen will have in history.
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