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

Critical Analysis of War Photographer by sing Ann DuffyIn his darkroom he is finally alonewith spools of suffering placed proscribed in ordered rows.The only light is red and quietly 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 stage business to do. Solutions slop in traysbeneath his hands which did not tremble sothough seem to now. Rural England. Home againto ordinary injure which simple weather can dispel,to fields which dont explode beneath the feetof tally children in a nightm be heat.Something is happening. A strangers featuresfaintly start to debase before his eyes,a half-formed ghost. He remembers the criesof this mans wife, how he sought approvalwithout address to do what someone mustand how the blood stained 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 between t he cleanse and pre-lunch beers.From the aeroplane he st atomic number 18s 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 a contendds for her poetry. Her poems, shesays, come from my quotidian experience, my past/memory and myimagination. People and characters are fascinating to me. Many of herpoems are based on true experiences and substantial people. In the 1970sCarol Ann Duffy was friendly with Don McCullin, a famous lensmanwhose photographs of war were astray 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 direct - it is based on the authenticexperience of a war photographer - and on a much wider level, sayingsomething about t he views and attitudes within our participation concerningthings that happen much further away. People are glad to surmountthemselves 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 Rural England. The warphotographer is the man who goes between these two worlds. The safeworld of England is gumption by the cliche of a typical Sunday Thebath and pre-lunch beers piece the horror of war is expressed through