Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy (former Poet Laureate of the UK) examines the life of a war photographer who takes pictures of conflicts for British newspapers.
Duffy takes us inside the man’s thoughts and work, evoking both the brutality of war and the indifference of those who live in comfort. The...
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 bath and pre-lunch beers.
From aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns a living and they do not care.
War Photographer was written by Carole Satyamurti.
Carol Ann Duffy released War Photographer on Tue Jan 01 1985.
The tone is one of depression and despair. The photographer operates in a mood of emotional detachment in order to survive. But it is when he comes home to his darkroom — itself a metaphor for the dark place in which he is existing mentally — that he has to develop the pictures and face reality.
T...
Duffy hasn’t specified. It could be any war in the modern era. It is pre-digital – she writes about spools of film. But I would take it to mean any war in which images are taken to be published, and the emotional cost to those making a record of what they see.
Beyond this Duffy is making a profound...
The poem is laid out in four regular six-line stanzas, with each stanza ending in a rhyming couplet.
This structure is interesting since its very rigid order contrasts with the chaotic, disturbing images described in the poem.