In this medley of voices—journal entries and letters of a soldier preparing for war, the philosophical reflections of Lucretius, the poet’s rich imaginings of her grandfather’s inner life—Nana Lampton creates a moving meditation on war and its brutal mechanization in the 20th century, capturing the idealism and dutifulness of the young, the tedium of camp life, and the anachronism of cavalry on the eve of “the war to end all wars.” These voices, these poems, chime.

—Richard Taylor