The Missing of the Somme is part travelogue, part meditation on remembrance—and completely, unabashedly, unlike any other book about the First World War. Through visits to battlefields and memorials, Geoff Dyer examines the way that photographs and film, poetry and prose determined—sometimes in advance of the events described—the way we would think about and remember the war. With his characteristic originality and insight, Dyer untangles and reconstructs the network of myth and memory that illuminates our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.

The horrors of the First World War released a great outburst of emotional poetry from the soldiers who fought in it as well as many other giants of world literature. Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and W B Yeats are just some of the poets whose work is featured in this anthology. The raw emotion unleashed in these poems still has the power to move readers today. As well as poems detailing the miseries of war there are poems on themes of bravery, friendship and loyalty, and this collection shows how even in the depths of despair the human spirit can still triumph.

Laurence Binyon was a celebrated poet and art historian, who was a friend of both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Although over-age for military service in 1914, Binyon volunteered to serve on the front line as a medical orderly, an experience that directly informed his writing. Poems of Two Wars brings together for the first time the remarkable poems he wrote about both World War I and World War II. Binyon's 1914 poem "For the Fallen" is considered by many to be the single most famous poem written about World War I, and the poem is still read at remembrance services and carved onto thousands of war memorials. But Binyon's writings during the wars are substantial and as moving as his most well known works. Binyon not only wrote compelling poems about his time working in a battlefield hospital in France, but during World War II he penned some of the most powerful poems about the war written by a non-combatant, including "The Burning of the Leaves." Poems of Two Wars reveals the scope and intensity of Binyon's work and finally gives him his due as a skilled poet of some of history's most violent conflicts.