comparison between Poem And long Distance
Simon Armitage’s Poem and Tony Harrison’s Long Distance are similar in many ways, both focusing on a father figure in a family. Poem is a description of this man and Long Distance is another description though a slightly more complex one. Both the men in the poems seem to be not perfectly normal – in Poem he seems to have a split personality, almost schizophrenic, and the father in Long Distance cannot overcome the fact that his wife is dead. In Poem we are shown all these normal and quite nice things that he does as a father – looking after his mum, tucking his daughter up at night – and then these are contrasted with something else which seems very bad, for example punching his wife, at the end of the next line.