Curriculum Violette, by Robert Crawford

England and France – Englishness and Frenchness – were the two poles between which the wartime heroine Violette Szabo lived her life; so it seems fitting that this extraordinary response to her life by the poet, biographer and academic Robert Crawford is published in an elegant bilingual edition, with Crawford’s text on the right-hand pages, and on the left a French version by Paul Malgrati.

The year 2021 marks the centenary of Szabo’s birth, on June 26 1921; and although her brief career as a British secret agent parachuted into France in 1944 has been immortalised in several biographies, and in the book and film Carve Her Name With Pride, Crawford’s impulse to create this centenary tribute is more than justified by the sheer poetic power of his text, and by the unusual and haunting form it takes.

Essentially, Crawford’s poem reflects on Szabo’s life through five sections each laid out like a curriculum vitae. In the first, dated 1938, she is Violette Bushell, a 17-year-old shop assistant in

Brixton, the daughter of an English father and a French mother; in the fifth and last, dated 1945, she is Ensign Violette Szabo of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, a prisoner in Ravensbruck women’s concentration camp, facing imminent death.

Each CV follows the same pattern; name, date of birth, address, date of document, weather, and then a series of increasingly eccentric or surreal categories, capturing Violette’s journeys. It is hard to overstate the impact of a format that combines such a detailed, sensitive and loving poetic evocation of a