pointing to east and west and all citizens, psychically and politically, are co-opted into the waiting game of
deterrence,recruited to the ‘western gate’ as military watchmen in fear of NATO’s
sky and horizons. Other poems offer a less symptomatic view, a neo-Romantic
desire for some non-aligned trumping of the Cold War’s geopolitics: ‘the life of
the heart|and the grace which is open to both east and west’ of ‘Moon Poem’.^47
But even here it is difficult to disengage the lines of hope from the infections
and inflections of the other side’s discourses, as though the very environment to
which a post-Romantic might hold allegiance has already been polluted by nuclear
ideology. ‘On the Matter of Thermal Packing’ imagines the subject slushing through
the ‘meltwater’ generated by a thaw in the Cold War’s ice, ‘frozen water’ which
stands as a dream trope for the special relationship binding the UK to US nuclear
policy (coded as associating ‘New England’ with ‘English localism’).^48 But the
meltwater is toxic, radioactive, alive with the paranoia built into the Cold War’s
fear and hate system, its hold on minds, its infiltration of bodies, the ‘eloquence’ of
its propaganda:
The days a nuclear part
Gently holding the skull or
Head, the skin porous to the
Eloquence of...The Cold War may not be happening in quite the live way in which the World
Wars were fought. Nevertheless, poets, as all citizens, ‘must live in compulsion’,
Prynne’s striking phrase for Cold War subjection in ‘Star Damage at Home’. That
subjection is a compulsion both to feel and fear the nuclear sublime (‘the mortal
cloud...the idea of blood|raised to a final snow-capped abstraction’) and to
be forced politically to participate in the American superpower’s divisions (over
civil rights, over Vietnam), understood as a re-enactment of the Civil War (‘Fix
the eye on|the feast of hatred forcing the civil war|in the U.S.’^49 ). The special
relationship, Prynne argues, is just such an amalgam of compulsions at the level of
the imagination.
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s extraordinary concrete constructs in the Rousseauist ‘Little
Sparta’ garden in Lanarkshire ponder the intrusion of nuclear technology and death
into an aestheticizedfasciscantRomano-Anglo-Americanimperiumhaunted by a
corrupt/decadent dream of the French Revolution. Nuclear and military tropes
are wedded to seemingly decorative classical garden design (the aircraft carrier
birdbath, the temple with its inscription ‘To Apollo, His Music, His Missiles, His
Muses’, the dryad statues in camouflage) to create a radical and witty concrete
poetry of the Cold War as post-Enlightenment ideology. By the wee loch in the
garden, Lochan Eck, protected by seven machine-gun turrets, is the most striking
(^47) Prynne, ‘Moon Poem’, ibid. 54.
(^48) Prynne, ‘On the Matter of Thermal Packing’, ibid. 85.
(^49) Prynne, ‘Star Damage at Home’, ibid. 109.