ABSTRACT
Landscapes of war are not always external. In her poem "Cutting, Folding and Shaping" the American writer Grace Fallow Norton considers how, for many behind the lines, the observed or reported traces of war can open up dizzying and distressing internal perspectives. The poems are not widely read and rarely appear in anthologies of First World War verse. This chapter looks at how Norton's war poems use an array of "murmuring voices" to create internalised spaces and imagined warscapes, within which she can explore the ideological confusion of the early months of the war. "Cutting, Folding and Shaping" sits at the heart of Norton's poetic cycle "The Red Road", which was written as a response to her eyewitness experiences in France and England in the opening months of the war. Norton creates a powerful and disturbing voice in this poem; a dramatic monologue, intended to be read against the grain of its expression.
