Modern conflict poetry

Conflict Poetry
Study Guide
(FLIRT Analysis Model)
Created by Grade 9&10 Students
Hiroshima International School
GCSE Contemporary War Poetry
Web Site

‘At The Border, 1979’ by Choman Hardi
Background Info
● The poem is set at the border of Iran and Kurdistan in 1979: the
year that the poet returned with her family to their homelands.
● The poet, Choman Hardi, has an interest in human stories that
spring from the experience of migration, mostly because she was
a refugee of war twice in her own life as her family was forced to
flee the country when she was a child and once more when she
was a teenager.
● As the poem is from the first person perspective, it is regarded as
an autobiographical poem.

F: Form/Structure
Form:
● The poem follows no set poetic form
● Line breaks are arbitrary
-Many of the lines are end-stopped(different punctuation at the end)
-Some are broken by sounds
-Others flows naturally as single phrases
● The written form is a reflection of the theme of the poem
Structure:
● The story is organised around four different perspectives: the guards, the adult
refugees and the two children

L: Language
● uses poetic effect called bathos
● free verse
● figurative language and ambiguity
● narrative
● direct speech, has quotations (e.g. line 1,7)
● contrast between past and present
● detailed descriptions make refugees more vivid
● connotations (e.g. word “border” - border between life and death or
youth and age)
● contrast between adult’s romantic vision of the place and child’s
simple view of it. (e.g. line 26 describing the“homeland” as “Muddy”)

I: Imagery
● The imagery within this poem alters between the description that
the poet makes of her country and the description of the promises
her mother makes that is of their homeland.
Example: "The autumn soil continued to the other side..."/She said the
roads are much cleaner... The landscape is more beautiful..."
● The poet describes what she had observed as she experienced the
event, such as the weather, the state of the ground on which they
walked on, and the mountains that surrounded them.
● The adjectives in the poem are rather plain and not very out of the
ordinary due to the rather simplistic choice of language that the
poet had chosen.

T: Theme/Topic/Tone/Atmosphere
Theme/Topic:
● The poem dramatises a core experience of being a refugee: the
growing distance between the adult’s idea of home and the reality
● A “border” is just a line that separates a land so both sides don’t
have much difference (line 20-23)
● To a child, the crossing between lands are meaningless
Tone/Atmosphere :
● hope of the land that people are going
● depressing / telling the reality (From line 20)

Background Information
● Ciaran Carson is a poet and novelist from northern Ireland
● He lived through what became to be known as the Troubles.This
was the era of Irish nationalist terrorism that marked UK social and
political life from the 1970s to the 1990s. During that time
organisations such as the IRA fought to end British rule of Northern
Ireland.
● British troops became an everyday presence on the streets of
Belfast, the Northern Irish capital.
‘Belfast Confetti’ by Ciaran Carson

F: Form/Structure
Form:
● Short
● Lines are over-long and stanzas are stretched
● Two stanzas (first stanza = 5 lines, second stanza = 4 lines)
● Each line spills over creating additional lines with one or two words
→ Expressing the confusion during the riot and the bomb
● Eg. And/the explosion/Itself
Structure:
● Narrative Structure

L: Language
● uses street names (e.g. line 11-13). Both work on literal level and
metaphorical level.
● the soft alliteration of “f”
● uses harsh unpoetic words (e.g. line 3)
● force is used when spoken communication has broken down
● key sounds, “f” and “k”
● contains one or more examples of sounds

I: Imagery
● confusion of the riot causing psychological confusion in the mind of
the poet
● alliteration of ‘f’ (in the title) gives the idea of a wedding celebration
● links with the idea of exclamation marks
● uses harsh unpoetic words to express the lack of emotional
associations.
● links the riot to the battle in a bigger war

Background Info
● Was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland.
● Well known poet / documentary film maker
● Interested in global social issues (health, education and impact of war and
politics)
● 2006 collection of poems ‘A terrorist at my table’ which included The Right
Word
‘The Right Word’ by Imtiaz Dharker

F: Form/Structure
● Built around a single image
● Broken into three lines
● Structured around a conversation the poet is having with her self
● Loses its ambiguity in the end - revealing who the person is “a
child”
● End of each stanza (from 1~4) is an assumption of who the person
is:
❖ “A terrorist”
❖ “freedom-fighter”
❖ “hostile militant”
❖ “guerilla warrior”

L: Language
● The simplicity and straightforwardness of the poem's diction shows
the poet's desire to explicitly and clearly state the truth.
● Uses political and emotional connotations
● Associations are softened by the simple but strong domestic
images that conclude the poem: shared eating, taking off shoes.
(The image of the lurking terrorist is banished by a simple act of
human kindness )

I: Imagery
● Shows innocence and how people’s desires are not always bad.
Instead can be truthful and simple
● The shadows are metaphorical
● The child (outside the door) has had a darkened past
● The last word in each stanza describes how the poet sees the boy.
Example: terrorist, freedom fighter, hostile militant, guerrilla warrior,
etc.
● However from stanza 6, the poet notices/realises that the boy is
only just a innocent, young boy (“a boy who looks like your son,
too”)

● This poem is about identity and how people categorize others by
their looks.
● The poet is indecisive: he cannot decide how to label the subject.
● The poet’s message is to not judge a book by its cover. The boy’s
identity can differ depending on who you are and how you are
looking at the subject. For some people, the child may be a
“terrorist”, but for others it may be someone they love like their son.
● The poet is saying that in a world with so many point of views and
opinions, it is nearly impossible to truly label someone for who they
are.

Background Info
● Minhinnick was born in 1952
● a Welsh poet and novelist
● an activist for Friends of the Earth
● a lot of his work concerns people and places in Wales
● visited Iraq in 1998 (wrote poems based on his experience)
● Set in a busy street in Baghdad (after the First Gulf War of
1990)from the late 1980s until now, people have suffered because
of Saddam Hussein and effects of the allied invasion.
‘The Yellow Palm’ by Robert Minhinnick

F: Form
● Ballad (uses a strong rhythm and rhyme scheme)
● Verses instead of stanzas
● Lively rhythm contrasts with the content
● Each verse begins with the same line ”(anchors the poem)
“As I made my way down Palestine Street”
● Each Verse begins with interesting image →what the author sees
● Final two verses: tragedy is turned around

L: Language
● Emotive language
-Line 2: “funeral”
-Line 11: “blood”
-Line 30: “smile”
● Connotations of each word leads to contrast
o “women waving lilac stems” - lilac is a happy, pale pink color
which is a positive connotation
o “and the face of the man...who had breathed a poison gas” -
posion gives the sharper focus of the cause of death and
suffering which is a negative connotation

I: Imagery
● "Their salutes were those of imperial Guard”: is a metaphor that
describes how sincere the beggars were.
● “Down on my head fell the barbarian sun”:personification. The word
“barbarian” has a negative connotation. It is used to describe how
someone is unwelcomed: in this case, he is referring to the hot sun.

R: Rhythm/Rhyme
● Rhyme in each verse ABCBDB
● Song-like →Ballad
● Triple rhyme scheme gives poem energy
● Positive and negative rhymes (eg. pass-gas) gives the idea of the
beautiful city being torn apart
● Repetition of positive rhymes in the last stanza (eg. “palms”,
“salaams” and “arms”
Hope that the torn city will return as a normal market street in the
future

● The poet identifies Palestine Street and its people with the link
between local and global events, seeing beneath her exotic mask to
realize that modernization is shaping Baghdad as well.
● In the poem, it is implied that Palestine Street is linked to the world
outside due to their involvement with the 'Mother of All Wars' and as
the poet is part of it, he believes that rather than a another travel
writer within the nation, he is deeply linked to the suffering that he
observes around him.
● The poet describes a child who eats the fruit of the 'Yellow Palm',
where he can sees a symbol of the old Middle East, a self-
governing land with natural beauty, resources and traditions re-
emerging once again.

Background Info
Owen Sheers:
● Born in Fiji, raised in Wales
● Also a playwright, novelist (non-fiction and fiction)
● Wrote an opera for children
● Talks about arts in general on radio and television
● Writes about places, landscapes and people (their lives and his
family)
● History and identity of Wales had influenced him
‘Mametz Wood’ by Owen Sheers

Subject Matter
● Mametz Wood → “scene of fierce fighting” during the Battle of
Somme (WWI)
● Mametz Wood → Largest area of trees on the battlefield
● Generals thought that it would only take a few hours
● Ended up lasting 5 days (of fighting face-to-face)
● 4000 casualties with 600 dead
● Welsh victory
● Bravery was never really acknowledged

F: Form
● Each stanza has 3 lines
● Relatively long lines in the poem break up the neat form of the
poem; this represents the uneven earth and pieces of bones
sticking out of the ground. (lines 4 & 12)
● Stanzas 1 & 4 describes the Earth
● Stanzas 2, 3, 5 & 6 describes the people and the corpses/bones
● The last stanza acts as a conclusion and puts together the idea of
people and corpses in the battlefield

L: Language
● Written in plain everyday language
● Subtle use of sound throughout the poem - “The hymn to the dead”
● Assonance and alliteration : stanzas are connected with sounds
● Eg. “farmers” and “found”, “blades” “back” and “blown”
● Line 14/15 uses assonance of ‘a’ : “arm” “dance” “macabre”, then
“outlasted” in stanza 6 has the “most striking sound effect”
● Vowel changes ‘i’, ‘u’, ‘o’, ‘er’ and ‘a’ (pronounced vowels) as if it was a
song or a voice exercise in the final stanza:
As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing
slipped from their absent tongues Only clear rhyme
in the poem

I: Imagery
● Concluding stanza pulls together the disparate (different) images
● Mixes imagery of Mother Nature and mankind - shows they are
connected:
❖ “broken bird’s egg of a skull”(line 6)
❖ “...Farmers found them … tended the land back…”
❖ “A chit of bone”

● The poet addresses how the event have been buried and forgotten.
● The discovered remainings of the corpses are as old as bits of
“china plate”.
● The poet is disappointed by the injustice of history: is sorrowful that
the soldiers who fought are not acknowledged or celebrated.
● The poet is seeking for redemption: he wants the world to be able
to know and understand the soldiers who fought in Mametz Wood
during the Battle of the Somme.
● The term “unearthed” not only symbolized how the corpses were
found, but also that the truth has been revealed.

Modern conflict poetry

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