Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Power and conflict anthology (2)
- War photographer
- A war photographer returns from a war zone to develop his photographs
- He remembers the cries of a man's wife as that person's picture is developing
- Only a few photos will appear in the paper
- Poet insinuates that others only momentarily care for the people in the photos
- Structure
- Six-line stanzas with two pairs of rhyming couplets
- Context
- Echoes of 'napalm girl' photo taken in the Vietnam war
- 'Running children in a nightmare heat'
- Key quotations
- 'Spools of suffering set out in ordered rows'
- 'He, a priest preparing to intone a Mass'
- 'He has a job to do, solutions slop in trays'
- 'A stranger's features... a half-formed ghost'
- 'He remembers the cries of this man's wife'
- 'Blood stained into foreign dust'
- 'A hundred agonies in black and white'
- 'Where he earns his living
and they do not care
- Poppies
- Narrator says goodbye to her son who is going to war
- She longs for the times when he was young
- Her son is excited to leave
- Later, the mother leans against his
gravestone and longs for his laughter
- Structure
- Free verse
- Varying stanza length
- Context
- Part of a collection by Carol Ann Duffy called Exit Wounds
- Key quotations
- 'Three days before Armistice Sunday'
- 'Crimpled petals, spasms of red paper'
- 'Steeled the softening of my face
- 'Play at being Eskimos'
- 'Gelled blackthorn of your hair'
- 'You were away, intoxicated'
- 'Released a song bird from it's cage'
- My stomach busy making tucks, darts, pleats'
- 'Hoping to hear your playground voice'
- Kamikaze
- A girl's father leaves on a kamikaze mission but turns around
- She explains why he may have returned
- Nobody spoke to him when he came back, not even his wife
- Eventually, even his children stop speaking to him
- Structure
- Seven, six-line stanzas
- Three sentences long
- Context
- Japan's post- war society was very rigid and shame fell upon any kamikaze pilot's who came back
- Key quotations
- 'Head full of powerful incantations'
- 'A one-way journey into history'
- 'Little fishing boats... strung out like bunting'
- 'Green blue translucent sea'
- 'Remembered how he and his brothers'
- 'A tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous'
- 'Mother never spoke again in his prescence
- 'They treated him as though he no longer existed'
- 'We too learned to be silent'
- 'He must have wondered which had been the better way to die'
- The Emigree
- The speaker decribes leaving her country behind when she was young
- She hears that there is conflict there but she keeps her positive image of it
- She now realises that she cannot return and her child-like image of the place was false
- Structure
- Three stanzas
- No set rhyme scheme
- Context
- No context as it is unclear whether it is based off of real life
- Key quotations
- 'There once was I country... I left it as a child'
- 'The bright, filled paperweight'
- 'It may be at war, may be sick with tyrants'
- 'I am branded by an impression of sunlight'
- 'I have no passport, there's no way back at all'
- 'I comb it's hair and love it's shining eyes'
- 'Time rolls it's tanks & the frontiers rise before us'
- 'They accuse me of being dark in their free city'
- 'My city hides behind me'