Alamein to Zem Zem

The rare 1946 1st edition of Keith Douglas’ classic WW2 war memoir, Alamein to Zem Zem, published in London by Editions Poetry. The book is an account of the tank battles at Alamein and during the offensive that finally drove the Germans out of Africa shortly before he was killed in action in Normandy on 9th June 1944. The Spectator later described the book as ‘written in a highly charged, violent descriptive prose, powerfully contrived but sufficiently serious to convey the humour, the pathos and the literal beauty of that dead world of tanks, sand, scrub and human corpses. It is throughout the work of a poet, and the only book of the late war comparable in descriptive power and intelligence to the books of Remarque, Sassoon and Blunden which spoke in similar terms of 1914-1918.’ HCDJ