12/26/2023 0 Comments Home warsan shire meaningThe more precise the chosen voice in each of Riley’s 9 sections, the more successful the poem. Dog-tags feature several times as (being made of “vulcanized fibre”) they are often the only remaining evidence of a life a name without a body. There is a sardonic, black humour in the verses. Riley’s notes are as long as the poem sequence and it is the loss of the bodies – disfigurement past recognition or simply untraceably taken to pieces – that pre-occupies her. The voice is one of the squad (or a compilation of their voices) and compassion is evoked through a father who pursues them, convinced that “a charred scrap of shirt” is his son’s body, only to be told (hear the stabbing effect of the harsh rhyme) “the thing was just dirt”. Even the grisly bits are so devastated and decomposed as to be “almost unknowable”. The soldiers detailed to pursue this ghastly task (often long after fighting was over) unearth bodies, “bits that dropped in cloth bags”. More firmly focused on the 1914-18 conflict than the other sequences in The Pity and written in what Riley calls “a kind of ‘music-hall’ jingle or doggerel”, sections like ‘The postwar exhumation squad’s verse’ have a Brechtian feel. The two elements are held in tension partly because of Riley’s contrasting dual focus: the bodies of the dead and the possible consolations of spiritualism. Ely and Shire are the boldest in widening the orbit of the commission and interestingly are also (for me) the most successful, largely by co-opting the resultant technical schisms into what they wanted to say, both of them drawing on more contemporary material, closer to their own concerns and backgrounds.ĭenise Riley’s ‘A gramophone on the subject’ recalls Sassoon’s balancing act of anger and compassion. The four “sustained” responses to the topic (John Glenday’s was a separate, shorter brief) all splintered into fragments under the pressure of it. Overall, I think The Pity is remarkable – a gathering of voices, each wrestling with a nigh impossible commission. Here I complete the collection with comments on the work of Denise Riley, Zaffar Kunial and Warsan Shire. In my previous blog, I discussed the contributions of Steve Ely and John Glenday ( click here to read this). Given free to Society members (in the last couple of weeks it has come through my letterbox with the new issue of Poetry Review), it is also available to purchase online. Two months later the Poetry Society published The Pity as a limited edition anthology. On National Poetry Day (October 2014) four contemporary poets (chosen to represent “different poetics and perspectives”) performed new work about the legacy of the First World War.
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