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Simon Armitage introduces 'The Manhunt'
  • Key Stage 4
  • Year 10
  • English
This is a poem taken from a film that I made with Channel 4 called "The Not Dead," which is about PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and we made the film by interviewing lots of service personnel, people who'd been in the army and had fought in lots of different conflicts across the decades and had then come home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatized by experience that they'd had and things that they'd seen during conflict. And this poem was written about a soldier called Eddie, and it describes the wound and the course, the journey that a bullet had taken through his body when it had hit him, but I actually wrote it for his wife, Laura, and she read this poem in the film. I thought it was important to have a woman's voice in a film about war. She hadn't fought on the front line, but she had experienced the repercussions of war as he'd brought them home with him afterwards. And the poem's called "The Manhunt," because when she talked about how this round had hit him and how it had traveled through his body and come to halt down here somewhere, it was if she was describing a journey that she would have to make herself if she wanted to bring her husband back, because he'd become lost to her.
Simon Armitage introduces 'The Manhunt'
  • Key Stage 4
  • Year 10
  • English
This is a poem taken from a film that I made with Channel 4 called "The Not Dead," which is about PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and we made the film by interviewing lots of service personnel, people who'd been in the army and had fought in lots of different conflicts across the decades and had then come home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatized by experience that they'd had and things that they'd seen during conflict. And this poem was written about a soldier called Eddie, and it describes the wound and the course, the journey that a bullet had taken through his body when it had hit him, but I actually wrote it for his wife, Laura, and she read this poem in the film. I thought it was important to have a woman's voice in a film about war. She hadn't fought on the front line, but she had experienced the repercussions of war as he'd brought them home with him afterwards. And the poem's called "The Manhunt," because when she talked about how this round had hit him and how it had traveled through his body and come to halt down here somewhere, it was if she was describing a journey that she would have to make herself if she wanted to bring her husband back, because he'd become lost to her.
Simon Armitage reads 'The Manhunt' V2 © Simon Armitage.