SOURCE: "English Lessons," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXVIII, No. 25, August 10, 1992, pp. 74-9.

In the following excerpt from a review in which she also discusses Caryl Phillips's novel Cambridge (1992), Pierpont favorably assesses Regeneration.

"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity," Wilfred Owen wrote, in 1918, in an introduction he planned for his first collected volume. The lines eventually appeared in a slim edition of Owen's poems selected and published by friends in 1920, two years after his death, at age twenty-five, by German machine-gun fire during the week before the Armistice. Owen had begun his introduction with the warning "This book is not about heroes"—a hard-won lesson that, unthinkable in 1914, was largely taken for granted by 1920. From a writer, the lesson demanded the abandonment of England's long-ingrained pastoral-isle rhetoric. But the spareness and the irony with which Owen altered his work...