belfast confetti

• summary

  poet - Circan Carson

  speakers fear and psychological confusion during the troubles

  teaches readers about consequences of conflict
• context

  -poem is written about the trouble in northern Ireland

  -lived in northern Ireland during the roubles

  -protestants vs the Catholics

  -protestants wanted to remain part of the UK and the Catholics wanted independence

  -Belfast confetti - name given to home made bomb
• language, structure and form

  irregular line length, incomplete sentences, caesura, and enjambment make poem feel fragmented

  reader is struggling to think

  poem start in middle of action - sense of immediacy

  confusion

  extended metaphor of punctuation represent war torn streets
• "my name? where am i coming from? where am i going?"


  chaos stripped identity

  war created a lot of confusion

  lack of answers shows speaker cant think straight

  speaker is being asked or they are asking themselves
• "I know this labyrinth so well"


  usually difficult to navigate

  comparing area the speaker knows well to a labyrinth emphasises confusion

  city sound sinister mirroring fear felt by people disrupted by conflict
• "a fount of broken type"


  font

  words cannot describe the carnage

  war has broken and destroyed everything
• "raining exclamation marks"


  metaphor conveys alarm and intense sound of bomb

  visual image of debris

  anger felt by those affected by conflict