Critical Analysis of War Photographer by Carol Ann Duffy

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