War photographer

• In his darkroom he is finally alone


  Returning from conflict, could suggest he is in a dark mental space
• Spools of suffering set out in ordered rows


  Film, suffering seems futile
• A priest preparing to intone a mass


  Refusing to a funeral, suggest the scale of deaths and suffering he has wittnesed
• All flesh is grass


  Reference to bible (death), fleating nature of human life
• Which did not tremble then though seem to now

  showing guilt and ptsd
• to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet of running children in a nightmare heat


  Survivors guilt haunts him
• Stranglers features faintly start to twist


  Lack of compasion, large scale
• Blood stained into foreign dust


  Trying to create distance
• A hundred agonies … from which his editor will pick out five or sixs


  Hand picked view of war, not full picture
• Eyeballs prick with tears between the bath and pre lunch beers

  Doesn’t effect them
• They do not care

  Futility, desnsitised
• Cyclical poem


  Photographers experience repeat and continue to haunt him
• ABBCDD


  Trying to control his PTSD
• Key themes


  • duty
  • PTSD/truma
  • inscabability of war
  • futility of war
  • horrors of war
• Comparison poems


  • poppies
  • bayonet charge
  • exposure
  • remains
  • kamikaze