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

Critical Analysis of War Photographer by Carol Ann DuffyIn his darkroom he is finally alonewith spools of suffering set erupt in ordered rows.The only light is red and softly glows,as though this were a church and hea priest preparing to intone a Mass.Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.He has a job to do. Solutions slop in traysbeneath his hands which did not tremble thenthough seem to now. awkward England. Home againto ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,to fields which dont explode beneath the feetof running children in a nightmare heat.Something is happening. A strangers featuresfaintly start to twist before his eyes,a half-formed ghost. He remembers the criesof this mans wife, how he sought approvalwithout words to do what someone mustand how the blood stain into foreign dust.A hundred agonies in black-and-whiteFrom which his editor will pick out five or sixfor Sundays supplement. The readers eyeballs prickwith tears among the bath and pre-lunch beers.F rom the aeroplane he stares impassively wherehe earns his living and they do not care.Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She grew up inStaffordshire and went to university in Liverpool. Having spent sometime in London as a freelance writer, she now lives in Manchester. Shehas won many prizes and several awards for her poetry. Her poems, shesays, come from my everyday experience, my recent/memory and myimagination. People and characters are fascinating to me. Many of herpoems are based on true experiences and real people. In the 1970sCarol Ann Duffy was friendly with take up McCullin, a famous photographerwhose photographs of war were widely published and respected. Herpoem, War Photographer, (from Standing Female Nude, 1985), is basedon conversations she had with him.The poem works on a very personal level - it is based on the authenticexperience of a war photographer - and on a much wider level, adagesomething about the views and attitudes within our society concerning things that happen much further away. People are glad to distancethemselves from the harsh realities of war whilst keeping themselvesinformed of, and superficially sympathetic to these real lifesituations.The structure of this poem supports this dichotomy in that there aretwo contrasting worlds the world of war zones (Belfast. Beirut.Phnom Penh.) and the calmer world of uncouth England. The warphotographer is the man who goes between these two worlds. The safeworld of England is signified by the cliche of a typical Sunday Thebath and pre-lunch beers dapple the horror of war is expressed through