Poetry Sassoon, Siegfried: Counter-Attack and Other Poems. v2 *23 February 2013

[AlexBell]

This ebook of the second book of Siegfried Sassoon's war poems contains a brief biography, an Introduction by a fellow war poet, and forty poems. Many of the poems have long lines, and are best read in landscape orientation or on an iPad. His most memorable quotation is contained in the Introduction to this book: 'Let no one ever... from henceforth say a word in any way countenancing war... For war is hell and those who institute it are criminals.'

This is my first poetry ebook for the MobileRead Library, and I would be most grateful for feedback on how I have managed the long lines, the author's indents of some lines of some of the poems, and the links at the end of each poem which take one back to the list of poems.

As always if you find any errors please let me know so I can fix them.

23 February Version 2 uploaded - see note following SBT's post

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[issybird]

Thank you!

[SBT]

Nice!
I wonder if you've thought about adding
page-break-inside:avoid;
inside the div.verse in the CSS?

I find poetry tricky in epub, because the visual impact is so much more important than for prose. I like a generous left margin for poetry, but dislike line breaks. Often I enclose the poetry in an outer div and give a small percentage as a left margin, so I get a little air around the text which adjusts with the size of the screen. A narrow (but nice and readable) font can also help things. While I've just given up on making poetry books for Kindle.

A propos visuals, personally I find the backlink to the table of contents after each poem unappealing – it sorts of buts in just as you sit back to reflect on the poem. It would improve matters if it was put (unobtrusively) at the head instead. But that may just be me...

[AlexBell]

Thanks for your comments and suggestions, SBT; I really appreciate them.

- page-break-inside:avoid: Yes, I have, but since this was my first poetry book I didn't want to push my luck. And I'm a bit concerned about having big areas of white space if it's a long verse which only just will not fit on the page.
- return to contents: I'm not sure if that should be there at all. I do not know how people read poetry books; I guess on first read probably straight through, but on later reads probably choose a favourite poem from the ToC, and then want to go to another favourite poem. I've put the links in the toc.ncx pop-up ToC, but some people might think that redundant, and others might actually prefer the quick link back to the contents. Amazon in their ineffable wisdom don't allow access to the toc.ncx ToC.

I'm still feeling my my way on both matters you raise, and may well revise both Sassoon poetry books as time goes on.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by SBT

Nice!
I wonder if you've thought about adding
page-break-inside:avoid;
inside the div.verse in the CSS?

snipped

A propos visuals, personally I find the backlink to the table of contents after each poem unappealing – it sorts of buts in just as you sit back to reflect on the poem. It would improve matters if it was put (unobtrusively) at the head instead. But that may just be me...

Thanks, SBT. I've just uploaded version 2 - which has very few changes.

I spent hours trying to use page-break-inside:avoid work but in the end decided it was more trouble than it's worth. If I left all verses with page break avoid some of the long verses refused to load on the first page of the poem, and many of the others had ugly white space where for example two short verses were followed by one which so long it wouldn't fit on the page. I tried going through and putting page-break-inside:auto; in the verses which made the white space, but more verses needed that than had the avoid option - and I still couldn't eliminate the ugly white space.

Any comments from poets?

So the only change is to centre the backlinks in an attempt to make them less intrusive.