In 'I Brought the War with Me,' Lindsey Hilsum shares poetry inspired by the front lines

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: For Many years here on the “News Hour,” frequent contributor Lindsey Hilsum, an award-winning correspondent with Britain’s Channel 4 News, has been bringing us powerful reports from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and more.

This week, she has a new book out called “I Brought the War With Me,” marrying her life as a war correspondent with her love of poetry.

Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant visited Hilsum for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Man: Enemy for 500 meters.

Lindsey Hilsum, Author, “I Brought the War With Me: Stories and Poems from the Front Line”: So, the enemy is just 500 meters away?

Man: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Lindsey Hilsum: That’s not very far.

Man: Yes.

Lindsey Hilsum: Bit too close for comfort.

Man: Yes.

Malcolm Brabant: After 40 years of covering conflicts around the world, Lindsey Hilsum found inspiration for her new book in Ukraine’s s First World War-style trenches.

Lindsey Hilsum: That’s right, yes.

Man: Yes.

Lindsey Hilsum: I started to tweet out a poem a day. And, to my surprise, people started to react. They wanted more poems.

As I have covered more conflicts, I have turned to poetry more and more, because it’s sometimes — sometimes, the language we use as journalists is just not quite enough.

Not the Somme, but Donetsk, not 1916 but now in the 21st century, Ukrainian soldiers trudging through the splashing mire of the trenches.

Malcolm Brabant: Back home in North London, Hilsum began fusing vignettes from her distinguished front-line career with suitable poetry.

Lindsey Hilsum: Poets don’t have the answers, but they can help us find a way through the darkness.

By now, the outgoing fire was getting intense, and there was incoming too as we were trying to leave.

Malcolm Brabant: Hilsum is not a fan of poetry that scans.

Lindsey Hilsum: A lot of the sort of more tumpty, tumpty, tum poetry is rather patriotic and is rather rousing. And that’s not what I’m looking at.

What I care about is what Wilfred Owen called the pity of war, the pity war distilled. And that, I find, is often conveyed more effectively in freeform poetry.

We have just heard sniper fire overhead. That was after all the outgoing from the Ukrainian machine guns. So we’re just going to stay down here for a bit.

Malcolm Brabant: Hilsum marries the Ukrainian experience with stanzas mourning carnage in the trenches more than a century ago.

Lindsey Hilsum: “Here Dead Lie We” by A.E. HousMan, 1922. “Here dead lie we, because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, but young men think it is, and we were young.”

The outgoing machine gunfire from the Ukrainians is aimed at suppressing the Russians so they don’t fire back.

Malcolm Brabant: Are you a war junkie?

Lindsey Hilsum: No, I’m not. I feel that it’s really important that people understand the horror of war, and that is one of my main motivations.

Malcolm Brabant: Many correspondents will take a bottle of whiskey with them and they go to a war zone, but you take a book of poetry.

Lindsey Hilsum: I take both a bottle of whiskey and a book of poetry with me.

(Laughter)

Malcolm Brabant: You think the whiskey helps as well?

Lindsey Hilsum: Of course.

After a few minutes of quiet, it’s time for us to run across the open ground to the other trench. All safe.

Malcolm Brabant: Why do you think that poetry provides solace?

Lindsey Hilsum: Poetry does two things. On the one hand, it’s a connection, because somebody else, the poet, has felt or seen the same as I have, as you have.

But then it also gives you a certain distance, because it’s universal.

Malcolm Brabant: Hilsum reached for the lyricism of Yehuda Amichai, considered to be Israel’s finest poet, after meeting traumatized survivors of last year’s October the 7th Hamas terrorist attack on a music festival.

Woman: We were dancing, and those seconds of being so unbelievably happy and safe. Half-a-second after that, you are running for your life.

Lindsey Hilsum: On my desk, there’s a fragment of a hand grenade that didn’t kill me. And there it is, free as a butterfly.

Malcolm Brabant: And then came Israel’s response in Gaza.

When you go to a conflict, do you feel compelled to balance it up, effectively, by reading poets from both sides of the front line?

Lindsey Hilsum: No. It’s not about both sides. It’s not about journalistic concepts. It’s about emotion. It’s about intellectual purity and honesty. It’s not about all the things that journalists worry about.

That’s why it’s a liberation from the things that journalists worry about.

The Israeli soldiers, now deep inside Gaza, walk through streets their air force has destroyed.

Malcolm Brabant: To make sense of the conflict, Hilsum returned to Israel’s Yehuda Amichai, demonstrating that poetry transcends enemy lines.

Lindsey Hilsum: “From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring. The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.”

Journalism is of the moment, but poetry lasts forever.

Malcolm Brabant: Even if the poet is cut down in their prime, as was author and war crimes investigator Victoria Amelina, killed by a Russian missile in 2022 just after she wrote this.

Lindsey Hilsum: “Air raid sirens across the country. It feels like everyone is brought out for execution, but only one person gets targeted, usually the one at the edge, this time not you. All clear.”

Malcolm Brabant: Amid the suffering, it now falls to other Ukrainian poets, as Hilsum says, to turn terrible events into works of beauty and meaning.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Malcolm Brabant.