Power and conflict anthology (2)

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

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Power and conflict anthology (2)

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	Created by Joseph Hill over 5 years ago