What Were They Like?

Look at this site for comparison suggestions and in-depth analysis of the poem....
http://www.boardthebard.com/attachments/1578.pdf

The poet uses simple questions and answers to describe what happened to the people and culture of Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The horror of what happened is understated, the person replying to the questions always polite, always addressing the questioner as "Sir", while describing the horrors of the war, "there was time only to scream", in contrast to what had gone before, "when peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies".


One group of students performed this poem as if the questioner was a torturer/interrogator, and the person replying a victim. That brought out the hidden violence in the poem very well.
You only have to look at the picture here - Vietnamese children running from an airborne attack - to see the truth underlying the matter of fact tone of the poem.

Search for my tongue

This poem can be linked to any of the Different Cultures anthology poems which deal with language, but it's also about losing one's culture, so it can be compared to the poems about that.

I've never been able to speak two or more languages fluently, so it's hard for me to imagine how the poet must feel, but her image of having "two tongues in your mouth", her metaphor for speaking two languages, conjures up something from a horror film.

Moreover, instead of saying that she might forget how to speak her mother tongue (gujerati), she says it might "rot and die" in her mouth. Again, this suggests a horror film to me - imagine having your tongue rotting away!

A good site for revising this poem is:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english/poemscult/searchrev1.shtml

Gillian Clarke

We study Gillian Clarke's poems in year 11. Take a look at her website, and the poem, October, which you can find in the section for students. I love the way she describes the trees, as they "tremble gradually to gold".

The alliteration makes the words gradually and gold stick in the mind, and the idea of nature transforming itself into a precious metal, with a gentle, minimal, possibly fearful motion is attractive to me.

I wonder why she used the word tremble, rather than shiver. Maybe the word tremble suggests fear, and the death of her friend did panic her a little.

Certainly, it makes her want to get a lot of writing done, and she does refer to "panic" later, which I associate with the idea that she wants to write everything she needs to write as a poet before she has to leave.

I feel a bit that way myself, having spent the last three years spending time on learning new things about teaching, and working in classrooms instead of doing any writing of my own.....

There is always a choice to be made when one is interested in a lot of things. I think I'm making the right choices - hope you do the same!

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.
Robert Fritz

Vultures

Vultures is a poem that makes me shiver. I've always wondered what I would have done, had I had the choice of whether to go along with Nazism, or to fight against it. I like to think I'd have fought, but I can't be sure. None of us can be sure until we come up against the real situations. It's like Not My Business - a man can ignore the wrongs being done as long as he has food on the table, or can take sweeties home for the children.
I think it's the choice of words that make it most chilling - the contrast betwen affection and despair, a charnel house or Belsen, and a roost, a nest, a home.

This Room

Seems to me that Dharker wrote this poem when she came to a big change in her life, and one which made her feel excited, not to say ecstatic.
I love the way she uses alliteration - all those "c" words, like crack, crash, clang, crowd, clouds to give the impression of noise and something breaking. It reminds me of Blessing - which also
uses onomatopoeia to create excitement and a mood of celebration.
I've found a few sites which analyse the poem in detail (maybe a bit more detail than I needed!)