Van Wienen (Augustana College) arranges the 150 poems in this useful, carefully constructed collection chronologically--beginning in August 1914 and running through 1918. He takes the poems from newspapers, magazines, journals, and other sources not heretofore carefully mined for significant war literature. In a well-crafted critical introduction, he establishes that war writing can exist without having the authority of the battlefield to lend weight and credence to the sentiments expressed; what matters is how well the poetry reveals historical contingency. Using critical insights from Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery (CH, Jun'90) and Jane Tompkin's Sensational Designs (CH, Nov'85), the editor presents poems from only a few well-known authors, most of them written by authors long lost to literary history. Van Wienen discovered in The New York Times alone more than 400 war-related poems written before the official US declaration of war. In vastly expanding the canon of war poetry from the perspectives of popular literature, the editor shines a strong light into a neglected corner of US culture. Through thorough research, evidenced in extensive and detailed notes, the editor embeds the poetry in historical context, thereby allowing the poems to reveal fully their own elucidation of history and culture. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. B. Adler Valdosta State University

Synopsis/Annotation: Juxtaposing the high literary art of well-known modernists with wartime verse by working men and women, soldiers, and pacifists, Rendezvous with Death collects an unprecedented range of American poetic responses to the Great War.This masterfully assembled volume, arranged chronologically, reveals the poets' shifting, conflicting reactions to the war and highlights their efforts to shape U.S. policies and define American attitudes. Mark W. Van Wienen's introduction describes the politically charged, ubiquitous, and rapid responses necessary in a culture soaked in poetry, and his historical and biographical notes provide a sturdy framework for the study of poetry's role in social activism and change during the "war to end all wars."The most complete resource of its kind, Rendezvous with Death brings together poetry published in little magazines, labor journals, mainstream newspapers, and wartime anthologies in an effort to locate the contentious and disparate voices of these Americans in the dialogue of,their times. Alight with sorrow, grace, silliness, passion, wicked satire, and pride, works by IWW members, sock poets, soldiers' mothers, and protestors take their places next to those by Edith Wharton, Alan Seeger, Wallace Stevens, James Weldon Johnson, Amy Lowell, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.