The Dreaded Boy
The Dreaded Boy is a deeply affecting suite of poems documenting the violence and loss inflicted by modern warfare.
In contrast to the falling away from chivalric and Romantic aesthetics which propels the disillusionment of Britain's most famous generation of war poets, Owen's work very consciously addresses the mire of motives and cobbled-together justifications which characterise a peculiarly twenty-first century loss of morale.
Ambitious in its range of freshly blasted settings, the work shies away from sloganeering and transnational generalisations. Rather, it is through his skilful synthesis of culturally disparate personal perspectives and his wry orchestration of anecdotal detail that Antony Owen suggests the universal futility of sacrifice and loss.
The pamphlet was partly inspired by a Remembrance event which Owen organised in November 2009 for a small charity helping injured paratroopers.
Pighog Press is donating £1 from every copy of The Dreaded Boy sold to The Karen Woo Foundation.
ISBN 978-1-906309-17-6£5 plus £4 p&p
PENDANT
On bleak dunes of greying youth snow laid a wrinkled wreath.
Names somersault from mouths their winter breaths are informers.
Screams of war have no accent, and scarlet rags of bullets shall wear them.
No man's land is a room with a face in a door handle that hurts too much to turn.
The pendant sun shall wear their faces, untouched like medals in locked shrines.
