![\"keith-douglas.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/keith-douglas.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nThese grasses, ancient enemies
\nwaiting at the edge of towns
\nconceal a movement of live stones,
\nthe lizards with hoded eyes
\nof hostile miraculous age.<\/p>\nIt is now snow on the green space
\nof hilltops, only towns of white
\nwhose trees are populous with fruit
\nand girls whose velvet beauty is
\nhanded down to them, gentle ornaments.<\/p>\nHere I am a stranger clothed
\nin the separative glass cloak
\nof strangeness. The dark eyes, the bright-mouthed
\nsmiles, glance on the glass and break
\nfalling like fine strange insects.<\/p>\nBut from the grass, the incurable lizard,
\nthe dart of hatred for all strangers finds
\nin this armour, proof only against friends,
\nbreach after breach and like the gnat is busy
\nwounding the skin, leaving poison there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nPeople rightly remember the great British poets of the First World War, such as Wilfred Owen, but here in the States, at least, we have not heard nearly as much about Keith Douglas, who served with the Army in North Africa during the early part of the Second World War and then took part in the landing at Normandy—killed by a mortar attack three days later, at the age of 24. Simplify Me When I Am Dead<\/i><\/a>, first published in 1964, is a powerful distillation (with poems selected by Ted Hughes) of his power. “Although they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all set against the backdrop of the Second World War, they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t deal much in politics and history, taking the enormity of their period as a given,” observed Ali Shaw<\/a>. “Instead they focus on what it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like to be alive in such times.”<\/p>\n
Other poems include “Vergissmeinnicht (Forget-Me-Not)<\/a>” and “How to Kill<\/a>.” And, too, here’s an odd little film, a computer simulacrum, based on a photograph of Douglas, reading the poem that gives this collection its name:<\/p>\n