Poetry, Year 11: Tissue and The Emigrée (Power and Conflict option)

The Koran

提示Families sometimes record births and deaths inside their copy.

为什么The speaker thinks of the pages at the back of a family copy, where births and deaths have been written in by hand. Later examples include maps.

Human skin: the living tissue of the reader's own body

提示The title word has a second meaning.

为什么The last line stands alone and speaks to the reader directly. Human life is as thin and as easily marked as paper, and that fragility is presented as something of value.

Nine unrhymed four-line stanzas, then a single line on its own

提示The last stanza is the odd one out.

为什么One reading is that the lone final line breaks free of the pattern, as the poem hopes people might break free of the structures paper stands for.

Light

提示Hold a page up to a window.

为什么Thin pages that it can pass through are set against solid buildings that block it. The poem prefers what is thin, open and temporary to what is heavy and built to last.

2006

提示In the first decade of this century.

为什么It comes from Imtiaz Dharker's collection The Terrorist at My Table. She was born in Pakistan and grew up in Glasgow.

No: neither is ever named

提示It could be any of several places.

为什么Leaving it unnamed lets the poem stand for anyone forced from home. Carol Rumens was not herself an emigrant.

Sunlight

提示The opposite of the darkness she is told has fallen there.

为什么However dark the news of the place becomes, what she remembers stays bright. Ending each stanza on the same image shows how firmly she holds to it.

A child

提示Her picture of it has not grown up.

为什么She carries a child's vocabulary of the old language and a child's bright picture of the place. The poem admits the memory may not match what the country is now.

Like a gentle companion or pet that comes to her and that she looks after

提示She cannot go back to it, so it visits her.

为什么She cannot return because she has no passport. The remembered city is made into something small and loved that she has to protect from a hostile they.

1993

提示In the early 1990s.

为什么The poem is written in the first person and has no regular rhyme.