Poem of the Day: Phil Klay selects ‘God’

Phil Klay is always named among the best of contemporary American writers — especially about war and soldiers. After serving in the Marine Corps in Iraq, he would win the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 with his collection of short stories, “Redeployment,” followed by his 2020 novel, “Missionaries,” and his 2022 collection of essays, “Uncertain Ground.” The New York Sun is proud to run his selection of five war poems for this week that ends with Veterans Day (Armistice Day and Remembrance Day, in other English-speaking countries) on Friday, November 11.

For the first day of a week of war poetry in the Sun, guest editor Phil Klay writes: 

“God” by Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) is perhaps an odd poem to pick, if we’re looking for poems about soldiers and soldiering. Rosenberg, the poor child of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to Great Britain, served as an enlisted British soldier in World War I. Killed after a night patrol on April 1, 1918 in a town called Fampoux and buried in a mass grave, he wrote some of the most evocative poetry directly addressing the war itself — from the devastating “Dead Man’s Dump” to the painterly “Marching” and his masterful “Break of Day in the Trenches,” which Paul Fussell considered the greatest poem of the war.