“Lisa Barnard opens her book Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden with Margaret Sackville’s poem. It reckons with the trauma borne by returned soldiers as a form of distance that resides in the eyes, and in so doing the poem clarifies the extent to which the reciprocity of community depends on our collective ability to see the same thing. Barnard’s book condenses an extended series of attempts to resist the erasures imposed by state suppression of the true costs of war. It is a work which endeavours to banish the spectres that inevitably follow repression, by trying to see a wider spectrum of the consequences of what war has accomplished in our name.”