POEMS OF THE DECADE - THEMES, FORM AND STRUCTURE

Eat Me - Patience Agbabi THEMES

Eat Me - Patience Agbabi THEMES

Gender roles, power, fantasy vs reality, oppression/abuse, violence, revenge, colonialism, objectification, pleasure/desire, secrecy/shame, sex, sin

An Easy Passage - Julia Copus THEMES

Youth/age, transitions, envy + experience of older generation, childish innocence, inevitability of ageing + demands of adulthood

To My Nine-Year-Old Self - Helen Dunmore THEMES

Nostalgia, growing up, childhood innocence/adult experience, energy of youth/fragility of age, power of language, memories, regret, passage of time, optimism/pessimism

Material - Ros Barber THEMES

Identity, grief/loss, generational differences, motherhood, maternal love, regret/guilt, the past, childhood innocence/adult knowledge, family/community, legacy/history

Effects - Alan Jenkins THEMES

Grief, age/youth, growing old, generational differences, regret/guilt, identity, nostalgia, role of women, relationships, memories

A Minor Role - UA Fanthorpe THEMES

Dealing with difficult moments, social constructs around death, social pretence, illness, love and relationships, caring for others, loyalty/duty/sacrifice, mental health, Englishness, formality/stoism

On Her Blindness - Adam Thorpe THEMES

Denial, honesty/dishonesty, family relationships, attitudes to illness, coping mechanisms, fragility/ageing, observing/the observed, marginalisation

Genetics - Sinéad Morrissey THEMES

Family relationships, identity, unity/separation, marriage, science/religion, past/future, inheritance, future hopes and dreams, HAND MOTIF!

Giuseppe - Roderick Ford THEMES

Women's suffering, guilt/shame, power, treatment of minorities, responsibility, corruption in war time, dehumanisation, marginalisation, religion, truth/lies, appearance/reality, patriarchy, otherness

The Lammas Hireling - Ian Duhig THEMES

Antitheses (guilt/innocence, illusion/reality, waking/sleeping, animal/human, sanity/insanity, abundance/sparsity, predator/prey), supernatural, religious imagery, omens/folklore, otherness, transformation

The Gun - Vicki Feaver THEMES

Pleasure, corruption, power, domesticity, duality, boundaries, stereotypes, masculinity/femininity, human nature/transgression, primal desires, life/death

Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass - Simon Armitage THEMES

Man/nature, feminine/masculine, traditional gender roles, personification of chainsaw, power shift at the end

History - John Burnside THEMES

ANTITHESES: land/sea, human/nature, innocence/guilt, pessimism/hope, freedom/captivity, security/insecurity, outer/inner experience, global/personal

Please Hold - Ciaran O'Driscoll THEMES

Disempowerment, humans/technology, repetition, future, dystopia

The Furthest Distances I've Travelled - Leonita Flynn THEMES

Youth, romanticising the future, repetitive patterns of behaviour, transient relationships, freedom, expectation/reality, nostalgia/memories

The Deliverer - Tishani Doshi THEMES

Oppression of women, cycle of life, motherhood, class divide, corruption of life

Out of the Bag - Seamus Heaney THEMES

Time, memory, identity, culture, healing, power of poetry

From the Journal of a Disappointed Man - Andrew Motion THEMES

Masculinity/passivity, intellect/practicality, power/powerlessness, uselessness, social role, gender roles

Look We Have Coming to Dover - Daljit Nagra THEMES

Appearance/reality, immigration

Eat Me - Patience Agbabi FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Dramatic monologue
- Alliteration, assonance, repetition = excess
- Language choices = appearance of her body
- Rhyme/half-rhyme ABA = sense of being trapped

An Easy Passage - Julia Copus FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Free continuous, enjambement = speed of life from adolescence to adulthood
- Question comes half way through = balance the poem
- Beginning and end = physical beauty and transition of the girl

To My Nine-Year-Old Self - Helen Dunmore FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Uneven stanzas = ebb and flow of memory/emotion
- Stanza 3 = climax of relationship
- As the personas detach, the stanzas get shorter
- Enjambement = energy of the child, constant activity, passage of time
- Use of tenses: past and present, even within tenses

Material - Ros Barber FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Regular rhyme = constraint of formal era, desire to be like her mother
- Iambic tetrameter = fluid rhythm, coming to terms with grief?
- Each stanza is end stopped/complete, except stanza 5, where narrator is lost in memories

Effects - Alan Jenkins FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Dramatic monologue = personal, reflective
- Enjambement throughout = unstoppable flow of emotion, coming to terms with mother's death
- One long stanza = no time to comprehend
- Irregular rhyme, scattered couplets = moments he can make sense of
- Rhyming tercets = finality despite sense of incompleteness (chaos of illness is over, but not for the narrator)

A Minor Role - UA Fanthorpe FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Varying stanza length = illness is unpredictable
- Stanzas become shorter = breaking away from listing daily duties
- Euphemism and false cheerfulness = social pressure to conceal illness
- Imperatives = control needed to cope with suffering and sustain social pressure
- Present continuous verbs = relentless demands of illness
- Extended theatre metaphor

On Her Blindness - Adam Thorpe FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Gaps between stanzas = gaps in mother's life, disorientating the reader
- Enjambement = difficult to follow, continuity of pain
- Final line = unresolved? Out of context, like a statement - a conviction of hope?

Genetics - Sinéad Morrissey FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Villanelle structure - 5 tercets followed by a quatrain
- Half-rhyme = parent relationship connected through the narrator - the past but not through the present
- Iambic meter = a sense of drive, continuity, certainty of science and DNA
- Extra last line = creation of a new person; links to the first stanza - hope for a better relationship than the one with her parents?

Giuseppe - Roderick Ford FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Irregular stanzas = unpredictability of war
- Each stanza = a section of the story, forces reader to engage with each step
- No rhyme = cannot be swept up/lost in it
- Personal narrative = challenging reader's conscience

The Lammas Hireling - Ian Duhig FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Regular stanzas = contrast the experience the poem describes
- Iambic pentameter = the farmer's voice
- Monosyllabic words/colloquialisms = lack of understanding farmer has of the situation
- Antitheses = ambiguity of the story

The Gun - Vicki Feaver FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Each stanza's opening sentence builds violence
- Enjambement = pace, emphasises important ideas
- Single sentence stanzas = statements of fact
- Adverbial time markers = advancing narrative, escalating violence
- Quietly domestic imagery woven with violence
- Alliteration + (half-)rhyme = sense of pleasure

Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass - Simon Armitage FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Free verse
- Longer stanzas = hard work, shot stanzas = effortless triumph of the pampas grass
- Cyclical structure = nature + chainsaw's uselessness
- Shorter sentences, cliches + colloquialisms = narrator's complacency
- Lyrical + poetic language = pampas grass

History - John Burnside FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Fragmented structure = erratic, confused thoughts
- Disjointed - uncertain of what's to come
- Occasional moments of regular structure and iambic pentameter = attempt to make sense of what happened
- Kite motif = cyclical, continuity of life
- Full stop at the end = trying to come to a resolutio

Please Hold - Ciaran O'Driscoll FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Overlapping voices with the dramatic monologue of the narrator = narrator's lack of control
- Two long stanzas = monotony, never-ending
- Repetition = futility, endlessness
- Form: a diatribe
- No regular rhyme or rhythm = mimics natural speech, narrator's fears of turbulent/unpredictable future

The Furthest Distances I've Travelled - Leonita Flynn FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Enjambment = propels the poem, mimics freedom and spontaneity
- Dramatic monologue
- Consists of six sentences; most long, some v short = shorter sentences convey knowledge
- Rhyming couplets - some feel forced = challenge of keeping up with appearances

The Deliverer - Tishani Doshi FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Casual, blunt tone = normality of atrocities
- Stanzas split by time/place zones = multiple perspectives
- Final, single-line stanza = cyclical, return to oppression of women
- Title: Birth mother? Woman bringing the baby to America? Delivery of a parcel? Deliverer from evil? Women needing to be delivered from infanticide?

Out of the Bag - Seamus Heaney FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Enjambment and caesura
- Multiple view points: Child Heaney, 16-year-old Heaney, Adult Heaney, classical allusions

From the Journal of a Disappointed Man - Andrew Motion FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Regular four-line stanzas = the dull rhythm of the events
- Simplistic language for the workmen vs the speaker's more eloquent thoughts
- Dramatic monologue - plays with structure
- No rhyme = like a real journal

Look We Have Coming to Dover - Daljit Nagra FORM AND STRUCTURE

- Hybrid of standard and non-standard English = plays with language and identity
- First line of each stanza is shorter, summarises the rest of the stanza
- Nouns becoming verbs
- Colloquial language = subversion, playful tone