WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
The broad description of this poem would be about a photographer, taking pictures of scenes in the war. Judging from the language and phrases used , the pictures are not particularly nice ones. The writer is describing a photographer – the photographer is not writing about himself.
The first stanza is the introducing stanza. The writer is describing the photographer as “finally alone”, meaning that , after he has been taking pictures of the war, while seeing everyone, he can now sit in his darkroom (a room where photographs are processed) almost isolated from the outside world, and ready to look at the developing cold, gruesome photographs that he has taken. In the second line of the first stanza , the writer is said to quote: “with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows”. The words “spools of suffering” suggest to me that the photographs are nasty and horrid… and maybe even traumatising! “In ordered rows” are the pictures being laid out in rows. The next line: “the only light is red and softly glows” suggests to me that there was danger (hence the red – red shows danger: violence, death). But another way of looking at the line is the fact that the red is the light to prevent anyone coming in the darkroom while the photographs are in the stage of processing. “As though this were a church and he a priest preparing to intone a mass”. Here the writer is making a comparison to a priest. “Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh . The writer is telling of all the places the photographer has been , and he is emphasising that there was violence in many different parts of the world at that time of the war. And the phrase, “All flesh is grass” can be inverted to make: “All grass is flesh”, and then we find the phrase much easier to understand. We can find grass all over the world, and the writer is suggesting that there are dead bodies almost anywhere .
