war photographer

“all flesh is grass”

• links to themes: MEMORY AND LOSS, IDENTITYBiblical allusions within the statement originate from the Old Testament

  • This refers to the idea of life being fleeting and transitory

  • This perspective may have arisen in the war photographer due to his over-exposure to mortality within violent conflict and the injustice of war

• The full stop connotes a resolved attitude, how the war photographer is now permanently emotionally detached from the vibrancy of life due to the trauma of his job

“his hands which did not seem to tremble then though seem to now”

• links to themes: WAR AND CONFLICT, MEMORY AND LOSS, IDENTITY

• This phrase connotes how the photographer was previously unaffected by the graphic and tragic nature of the photographs but now is overwhelmed once outside of the battlefield that forces many to supress their emotions

  • Connotes how the trauma of war has integrated into the identity of the war photographer

“running children in a nightmare heat”

• links to themes: WAR AND CONFLICT, MEMORY AND LOSS

• AO3 - refers to the famous photo of a girl running away in Napalm attack

  • This photo had a large impact on the public - construed the effect of war on all members of society, regardless of whether violence towards them is deemed moral or  not

“a stranger’s features faintly start to twist before his eyes”

• links to themes: MEMORY AND LOSS, IDENTITY

• Idea of "twist" leads to a contortion of reality, how the impact of the war photography is minimised by the way it is presented within the media

• Also connotes the idea of how agony permanently mars all those affected by it, either physically or psychologically

“a hundred agonies in black-and-white from which his editor will pick out five or six”

• links to themes: WAR AND CONFLICT, MEMORY AND LOSS

• Demonstrates how the journalists have become desensitised to war and distastefully display violence and agony for monetary gain

• The use of numerical verbiage connotes both the scale of loss in war but also how soldiers and victims of war are reduced to mere casualties, without a remembrance of identity or impact

“eyeballs prick”

• links tot themes: WAR AND CONFLICT, MEMORY AND LOSS

• Use of word "eyeballs" connotes a lack of emotional involvement, connoting that the crying of the readers is mechanical and is done to fulfil imposed moral conventions

structure

• written in blank verse

  • structure connotes emotional detachment, used as a coping mechanism for the war photographer to deal with the graphic scenes of war

AO3

• written in 1985

  • the poem focuses on the Vietnam War, as it was written only 1 decade after the war ceased

• Duffy was poet laureate, 2009-2019

• Duffy is friends with 2 famous war photographers

  • Don McCullin (who photographed for The Observer) stated: “we don’t live in a black and white world”

  • the poem is a truthful insight into the media’s portrayal of violence, which is a persistent issue even in 21st century media