The Salamander Oasis Trust was founded in 1976 from among those who served in the Middle East during the Second World War, and took part in compiling the original Oasis anthology in Cairo in 1942-3. The trust was set up to collect and publish poems from the Second World War and now has a collection of over 14,000 manuscripts, archived in the Imperial War Museum. This selection features both established poets and those "unknowns" who were moved to write by their experience of war. The only requirement for inclusion is that all the writers were participants in the war. Because all the poems were written during the war, the poetry has the immediacy of an eyewitness. This collection provides an understanding of what war meant for so many ordinary people - both men and women - and is also a social history of the Second World War, of those who fought and those who stayed at home.