Jon Stallworthy wrote his first poems during school days shadowed by the Second World War and a mother's memories of a brother and friends killed in the First. At school he was introduced to the poems of Wilfred Owen, whose biography he would later write, and to those of others who would be represented in his Oxford Books of War Poetry. Many of the most anthologized and ambitious of his own poems--"No Ordinary Sunday," "A Letter from Berlin," "The Nutcracker," "A Poem about Poems about Vietnam"--respond to wars that scarred the 20th century. A recent uncollected poem, from which the book takes its title, sheds piercing light on the dark aftermath of the conflict so bitterly remembered today as "the war to end wars."

Jon Stallworthy is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature and is a professor of English literature at Oxford University. He is the author of numerous books, including the poetry collection Body Language and biographies of Louis MacNeice and Wilfred Owen, the latter of which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also the editor of Wilfred Owen's Complete Poems and Fragments, Henry Reed's Collected Poems, and several anthologies.