Poetry on War An Analysis

Poetry on War An AnalysisOpening with Auspices, an astonishing performance by Susan Mason which straighta management reminds of the African workers singing blues in 19th Century South American coltures, Poets on War clearly committed to the sufferings of war and imprisonment from the very beginning.Held on 1st February 2017 at the Southbank Centre, London, as take apart of The Poetry Librarys special edition, which takes place every offset printing Wednesday of the month, the event was based on the participation of four modern-day poets, Ruth OCallaghan, Adnan al-Sayegh, Jenny Lewis and Hylda Sims, who tried to look at war with the sentiments of horror, sympathy and humour. As a result of a splendid collaboration between the transformation of such poets and their poems and the way they decided to lead them, the event immediately took the shades and the features of the so-called world literature, moving from London artistically and linguistically for a brace of hours.Ruth OCalla ghan and some extracts from her collection Vortices (Shoestring, 2015) directed the first part of the evening. Approaching the idea of war and borders between countries and people, Ruth discusses and traces conflicts from bibical times to present day, raising the challenging reflection that war has been an unfortunate constant in human beings lives and that poetry has followed it, giving voice to its effects and consequences.Hotel Owner is the poem that opens the first section and meditates on the idea of the hotel as a country without boundaries, in which people could feel safe, live and escape the world outside. 1914, on the other hand, treats the more technical part of the war, accounting for the ways in which slaughters have been perpetrated over history and particularly how death had different ideas in 1914. However, the most interesting points came out from Meine Liebe Mutter, which outlines the horrors of the war trace sensitively and respectfully the theme of son-mother r ecountingship on the background of the Second World War. In concentration camps death had become ordinary and Ruth deeply describes how the prisoners used to confront it we never turned our face against the enemy, as killing is an intimate act. This striking idea of a connection between victim and murderer had a chilling impact on the whole audience it placed a real difficulty in deciding with which part the reader would sympathise. The relation established is so close but we are still so far from understanding the private, perpetual awareness of death.At suffer, before ending tended to(p) by a singing duet by Susan Mason and Emelia Lederleitnerova, Ruth quoted Tony Blair in his famous 1997 victory speech in which he claimed that his would have been the first generation ever not going to war or sending their children to war as the poet observed after, he did not make the dream last long, declaring war on Talibans in 2001 and giving life to a new generation of soldiers and war poe ts.The second part of the event left space to the distinguish Iraqi poet-in-exile Adnan al-Sayegh. Experienced imprisonment during the Iran-Iraq war and sentenced to death in 1996 for the publication of the poem Uruks Anthem, Adnan took refuge in Sweden and has been living in London since 2004. His poetry, translated in several(prenominal) languages, is actively political and set against oppression and injustice, demonstrating an intense passion for freedom, love and beauty. In Poets on War, he gave the audience the pleasure to hear his lines recited in Arabic, their pilot language and then read out loud in translation thanks to the collaboration of Jenny Lewis, writer and teacher in poetry at Oxford University.Adnan transported the audience into another world the melodic sound of Arabic was incredibly effective in trasmitting the sufferings and despair of the Iraqi experience and gave the event a take on of powerful originality. Delivering the message in the original language, t he poet made clear how feelings such as pain and fear are universal and how languages and cultures become a way to make their acquaitance under different perspectives. Wars have broken out terribly equally everywhere and have made people escape their homelands in reckon of safer places, devastating lives and families if nowhere is immune to war, then, as it was remarked in Second Song to Inanna/Ishtar, Let poetry be our country.The Iraqi poet actively shared the stage with dickens wonderful women Jenny Lewis, who collaborated with him and participated with some poems of hers and Hylda Sims, who elegantly challenged all the skeptics who claim that war cannot be approached with any kind of humour. Gripping her guitar under her arm, she started singing her famous lay in LadenBin Ladens in my garden outside Canada SquareShall I bring him a cup of tea?Im afraid hes got to goMaking the line lively and vibrant, Hylda gave a huge contribution to the structure of the event she offered a new modern view on the theme of war by in addition incorporating the genre of the song and involved the audience in it teaching them her version of Adnans Sketch to sing, which made the small library look much more familiar. overly being the elder component of the troop of Poets on War, her voice and tone proved to extremely grasp our times with consciousness, from the side of common people.Introducing her poem twenty-first Century War, which is very much about the 11th September 2001 terroristic attack, Hylda made a salient point about how war is still thriving some us but we are not always directly aware of it, even when we see its brutal consequences as the events programme stated, The 21st century appears to already have equalled previous centuries for death, displacement, terrorism, political misjudgement and religious conflict and we as historical witnesses should keep a better pace with it.Overall, meant to be a travel in war poetry, this reunion of thoughts successfully c aught the attention of the audience by mentioning contemporary and modern issues and by involving them in a friendly, accessible musical environment.