The Dreaded Boy

In contrast to the falling away from chivalric and Romantic aesthetics which propels the disillusionment of Britain's most famous generation of war poets, Owen's work very consciously addresses the mire of motives and cobbled-together justifications which characterise a peculiarly twenty-first century loss of morale. Ambitious in its range of freshly blasted settings, the work shies away from sloganeering and transnational generalisations. Rather, it is through his skilful synthesis of culturally disparate personal perspectives and his wry orchestration of anecdotal detail that Antony Owen suggests the universal futility of sacrifice and loss. The pamphlet was partly inspired by a Remembrance event which Owen organised in November 2009 for a small charity helping injured paratroopers