Mametz Wood by Arrufat and Villalva

Mametz wood by Laura Segura & M Leticia Tapia Grande

Project Work: 100 Years of Memory: Centenary of World War I

As part of the project the students of L & C II, 2014 recreated a poem by Owen Sheers, Mametz Wood.

I wrote this next poem, 'Mametz Wood', when I went to the Somme battlefield to make a short film about two Welsh writers who had fought at this place. The two writers were called David Jones and Wyn Griffith, and they wrote very very different accounts of this dreadful battle, but it was a strange battle because there seemed to be lots of poets present: it was also where Robert Graves was wounded; Siegfried Sassoon actually watched the battle, so it's a battlefield of the Somme that appears again and again in memoirs of poets and actually in their poetry, and I really wrote this because while I was there they uncovered a shallow grave of twenty Allied soldiers who had been buried very very quickly but whoever had buried them had taken the time to actually link their arms, arm-in-arm, and when I saw a photograph of this grave I just knew that it was one of those images that had burned itself onto my mind and I knew that I would want to write about it eventually. As it happens I did, but the poem took a long time to surface very much in the same way that those elements of the battle are still surfacing through the fields eighty-five years later. - 

Listen to the poet talking about why he wrote the poem and his reading of it.

http://www.poetryarchive.org/

Work done by

How to understand the difference between the UK and Great Britain

War Poets

This year is the  centenary of the First World War. 

Follow the links below to other blog posts on the War Poets:

The War Poets revisited: a modern-day response to 1914

War Poets

World War I and Art

War Horse

In 1914, Joey, a young farm horse, is sold to the army and thrust into the midst of the war on the Western Front. With his officer, he charges towards the enemy, witnessing the horror of the frontline. But even in the desolation of the trenches, Joey’s courage touches the soldiers around him.




War Horse at the theatre:



Movie:



Interactive map and video of WWI

http://www.warhorseonstage.com/app/webroot/map/

Michael Morpurgo`s official website:http://michaelmorpurgo.com/