War Photographer & Tissue

This lesson pairs two poems by female poets that explore power and conflict through intellectual, reflective lenses. Duffy's War Photographer examines the moral complexity of documenting suffering, while Dharker's Tissue uses the fragile image of paper to question the structures of power that human beings construct. Both poems step back from the battlefield to consider conflict from a wider perspective.

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War Photographer — Carol Ann Duffy (1985)

Context

Fact	Detail
Poet	Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955)
Role	Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2019
Inspiration	Duffy's friendship with war photographers, particularly Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths
Theme	The ethics of photographing suffering; the gap between conflict zones and comfortable Western life
Form	Four regular sestets (6-line stanzas) with a loose rhyme scheme