Critical Analysis of War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy :: English Literature

Critical Analysis of War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy In his darkroom he is finally alone with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows. The only light is red and softly glows, as though this were a church and he a priest preparing to intone a Mass. Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass. He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays beneath his hands which did not tremble then though seem to now. Rural England. Home again to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel, to fields which don't explode beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat. Something is happening. A stranger's features faintly start to twist before his eyes, a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries of this man's wife, how he sought approval without words to do what someone must and how the blood stained into foreign dust. A hundred agonies in black-and-white From which his editor will pick out five or six for Sunday's supplement. The reader's eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers. From the aeroplane he stares impassively where he earns his living and they do not care. Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She grew up in Staffordshire and went to university in Liverpool. Having spent some time in London as a freelance writer, she now lives in Manchester. She has won many prizes and several awards for her poetry. Her poems, she says, 'come from my everyday experience, my past/memory and my imagination. People and characters are fascinating to me'. Many of her poems are based on true experiences and real people. In the 1970s Carol Ann Duffy was friendly with Don McCullin, a famous photographer whose photographs of war were widely published and respected. Her poem, "War Photographer", (from Standing Female Nude, 1985), is based on conversations she had with him. The poem works on a very personal level - it is based on the authentic experience of a war photographer - and on a much wider level, saying something about the views and attitudes within our society concerning things that happen much further away. People are glad to distance themselves from the harsh realities of war whilst keeping themselves informed of, and superficially sympathetic to these real life situations. The structure of this poem supports this dichotomy in that there are two contrasting worlds: the world of war zones ("Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh.") and the calmer world of "Rural England". The war photographer is the man who goes between these two worlds. The safe world of England is signified by the cliche of a typical Sunday: "The bath and pre-lunch beers" while the horror of war is expressed through