Poppies

jane weir

Published: 2009

Birth – Death: 1963 - ?

Monarch: Elizabeth II

Prime Minister: Gordon Brown (Labour)

Nationality: Anglo-Italian

Poppies was commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy as part of a collection of ten contemporary war poems which were published in the Guardian in 200 as part of the response to the ascending conflict in Afghanistan and the Iraq inquiry.

who is jane weir?

The Anglo-Italian writer and designer Jane Weir grew up in Manchester.

Born in 1963, grew up in Italy and England.

Lived in Norther Ireland in the 1980s and experienced The Troubles.

“I was aware of the variety of women’s voices, in particular Mothers, wives and girlfriends, writing from the ‘homefront’ to the ‘battlefield frontline’ in letters. I read letters from all sorts of women, including some by Susan Owen, Wilfred Owen’s mother.”

At an interview Weir said: “At the time the news was full of conflict; Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and of course we’d had the Balkans, and various ‘tribal wars’ in Africa…. We very rarely hear the women speak. I have two sons myself and I’d read in the newspapers, seen on TV the verdicts from the inquests on soldiers killed in Iraq. Who could forget the harrowing testimonies of the soldiers families, and in particular their Mothers…and I was angry and frustrated at the apathy, or what I perceived as ‘voicelessness’ and ability to be heard or get any kind of justice. I wanted to write a poem from the point of view of a mother and her relationship with her son, a child who was loved cherished and protected… and it had led to this…. heightened and absolute fear that parents experience in letting their children go, the anxiety and ultimately the pain of loss…”.

‘’The principle motive is language itself; its mutability (tendency to change) in representing both the abstract or the real.’’

who is jane weir?

Jane Weir and her youngest son used to go to a graveyard ‘daily’ where a war memorial was placed as a way of ‘escaping’.

She wondered what pain mothers went through when losing their child through a war.

She says: ‘Poppies is really a poem of remembrance. It’s remembering the dead, its remembering not just, um… Dead but as alive and active as the boy isn’t in the poem.’

She thinks it is important for younger generations should always remember the losses of wars from the past and potentially the future.

If you think about felt making, if you think about the layers, the way they overlap with each other and then almost melt into a kind of solidity and form a kind of barrier as sort of muffling barrier to, to pain. To anything that tries to penetrate it. I thought that’d be a really interesting way actually talking about pain and in a way about loss and what we actually do with loss and where it goes in the body.

Historical Context

Armistice Sunday began as a marking of the end of the first world war in 1918. It was set up to remember the several hundreds and thousands of men who lost their lives during that war. Poppies were made as a symbol of that since those were the flowers that bloomed over the fields where battles were fought.