Power and conflict anthology (2)

Power and conflict anthology (2)

1. 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

2. 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'

3. 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'

4. 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'