From the Guardian Review: "Harry Ricketts's Strange Meetings features a good deal of dutiful tramping, and a few gleams of fresh lighting. It doesn't so much say new things, as say old things in a new way....Noticing how many of these poets met while fighting or recuperating, and how often those that survived the war maintained (often tempestuous) relationships after it had ended, Ricketts tells the story of their friendships so as to highlight mutual influences, envies, admirations and disgruntlements. It makes the poems seem linked to one another as well as their circumstances, and adds a sense of intimacy as well as common purpose to the strategies they adopt....


After cataloguing the often very touching exhibits, which he rightly remembers as objects at "a site of saints' relics", he concludes: "They showed us human nature tested up to and beyond breaking point. They showed us courage, anger, humour, compassion. Their picture of war is the one we carry with us. They remain our contemporaries. They remind us what we are capable of." This is all true enough – but it is also familiar to the point of banality. "