Conflict: the impact of war on people

War Photographer (Carole Satyamurti): a female war photographer remembers two pictures: wealthy young women enjoying themselves at a race meeting, and a small girl carrying a baby along a ruined street, where a bomb explodes moments after the shot. She is angry that the published photo was captioned as if it showed hope and the human spirit. (This is not Carol Ann Duffy's poem of the same name.)
Belfast Confetti (Ciaran Carson): during a riot in Belfast in the Troubles, a bomb goes off. The speaker runs through streets he knows but cannot escape, is stopped at a checkpoint and questioned, and cannot answer simple questions about who he is and where he is going.
Poppies (Jane Weir): a mother remembers pinning a poppy on her son's lapel before he leaves home, holding back her emotion. Afterwards she goes to his bedroom and then to a war memorial, where she listens for his voice. It is left unclear whether he has died, which adds to her fear.
What Were They Like? (Denise Levertov): written during the Vietnam War. The first stanza asks six questions about the Vietnamese people's culture; the second answers them, showing that their way of life has been destroyed and is barely remembered.

The human cost of war: none of these poems is about glory. They focus on civilians, families and memory, a contrast with The Charge of the Light Brigade.
How war is told: Satyamurti attacks comforting captions; Levertov's answers suggest a culture known only through records; Carson's speaker loses the words to explain himself.
Grief and fear at home: Weir shows war's impact on a mother far from the fighting.
Identity destroyed: Carson's speaker cannot say who he is; Levertov shows a whole people's culture wiped out.
Context: the Troubles in Northern Ireland lasted from the late 1960s to 1998; Carson was born in Belfast in 1948. Weir's poem was commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy, then Poet Laureate, for a collection of poems responding to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Levertov was a British-born poet who lived in the USA and opposed the Vietnam War.

Satyamurti: first-person dramatic monologue in free verse; juxtaposition of luxury and suffering; harsh sounds for the explosion; the ending compares the line between safety and horror to something as random as a bloodstain.
Carson: an extended metaphor of punctuation: the 'confetti' is shrapnel such as nuts, bolts and nails, falling like exclamation marks, and the streets are blocked by stops and colons. Long, broken lines and rhetorical questions at the end show confusion. Several Belfast streets are named after places and people of the Crimean War, such as Balaclava, Inkerman and Raglan, linking past and present wars.
Weir: free verse with enjambment and caesura; domestic and textile imagery (sewing, fabric) for a mother's love; a bird and a dove as images of release and peace.
Levertov: a question and answer structure, like an interview or an official report; gentle images of culture set against blunt answers about bombing and death.
To write well: explain how structure carries meaning. For example, Levertov's numbered answers sound official and cold, which makes the loss more shocking.