Carol Ann Duffy is a renowned poet who has recently turned her attention to the plight of those who struggle to deal with the aftermath of horrific events experienced when at war. Her most recent poem focuses on a war photographer who returns home to the tranquillity of rural England after months in a war zone. Duffy’s inspiration to write this poem was through her friendship with a war photographer. The poem details the inner conflict experienced by the photographer and his all too real struggle to contain his feelings as the horrors he has witnessed resurface in his everyday life. The poem addresses the challenge faced by war photographers, whose job is to record horrific events without being able to help them directly as well as the travesty that many people are ignorant of the atrocities of war. This is something that poets, such as Wilfred Owen, have tackled so eloquently. …show more content…
With him are all the photographs he has taken of the war, ‘set out in ordered rows’, making him feel like a priest about to begin a mass funeral. Such imagery taps into the symbolic associations of ordinary words. In the first stanza, the photographer is described as standing alone in the ‘darkroom’ with the only light being red. The development a photo is suddenly turned into something ominous as the dark contains the idea of evil and red is associated with blood. Similarly, ordered rows would appear innocently enough but here it forces us to image bodies waiting to be buried. In addition, a paradox is apparent as the chaos of war is made to be organized into neat ordered rows. The following stanza ends the calm tone with two short sentences; ‘He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays’. The second phrase has a double meaning, referring to both the onomatopoeic sound of the liquids but also the optimism that in some way these photographers may contribute to the resolution of such