Remains notes

summary

• speaker describes being sent to deal with looters at a bank in a middle eastern war zone
• one of the looters runs away and the speaker and two others open fire on him, hitting him with about twelve rounds, and spilling his internal organs onto the street
• the speaker's friend puts the man's guts back inside and the body is taken away
• the speaker recalls seeing the man's 'blood-shadow' on the street when on patrol- i.e. the blood left by the body on the pavement
• he goes on to describe being haunted by images of the looter long afterwards. implying a metaphorical shadow left by the man in the speaker's life, which turning to drink and drugs cannot erase

key aspects

• a strongly colloquial voice is used, with many informal phrases
• armitage uses repetition of ideas, phrased in different ways, to show how the speaker's mind keeps going over the events
• armitage creates a symbolic afterlife for the victim in the pom, using an internalised and more poetic voice for the continuing impact of his death which contrats with the anecdotal, everyday recounting of the initial event
• armitage chooses a title with various connotations, including the idea of human remains, the persistant memories the soldier has, what is left of the soldier after his experiences

key setting: middle eastern war zone

• armitage keeps the precise setting vague
• at first we encounter a semantic field of only urban references: 'bank', 'road', 'lorry', 'street'
• the real detail comes at the end, once the speaker is at home and unable to forget the man he helped kill
• here armitage provides a list of adjectives- 'distant, sun-stunned, sand-smothered'- to convey the speaker's sympathy with a land which he views as being at the mercy of the elements
• they are preceded by 'some', which helps shows the soldier's negative attitude to that country, due to his disturbing experiences there, and emphasises the relative unimportance of the precise location
• it is what happended to the soldier on a personal level which matters, not the particular conflict and specific setting

key technique: conversational tone

• armitage's chatty style creates a strongly personal voice for the soldier, by using many informal words and colloquial phrases
• it is easy to imagine that this poem is part of a conversation with a soldier telling his experiences to a group of friends
• the opening feels like the middle of a story, with 'another occasion' implying that anecdotes have already been exchanged
• the tone…