Silence of the Fathers: Poetics of Filiation in Two Contemporary War Poetry Collections, Jenny Lewis’ Taking Mesopotamia (2014) and Seni Seneviratne’s Unknown Soldier (2019)

This article seeks to show how, alongside the popular and highly marketed genre of the ‘filial narrative’ or ‘paternal memoir’, contemporary poetics have witnessed the emergence of a new form which I call here ‘poetry of filiation’. I take as examples two contemporary British poetry collections written by daughters and grounded in the archives of their fathers’ wartime service during the First and Second World Wars: Jenny Lewis’ Taking Mesopotamia (2014) and Seni Seneviratne’s Unknown Soldier (2019). Drawing on contemporary theories of life-writing, postcolonial theory and postmemory, I analyse how genealogical poetics enable a new, decentred approach to family history, restoring the voices of those forgotten by official historical narratives. This article will be of interest to scholars seeking to better understand the relationship between auto/biographic poetry and history and the postmemorial processes shaping contemporary British poetry.