adam piette
of territory, public and private. ‘Finding the Range’ argues for poetry’s peace whilst
acknowledging,through edgy satire, the Cold War’s grip on its own landscapes. The
men with their rifles may chance upon the lovers, may even have poetry in their
sights: but the art of peace has taken due cover in the copse, and dares to please
itself with an Aristophanic joke about the weird games the powers that be may play.
Their rehearsal of the game of war is judged and betrayed by the rival art, even at the
risk of a counter-energy accusing the poet of sleeping on duty, sheep-like, drifting,
insubstantially dreaming behind the lines of the ‘peace’-keeping Cold War.
Robinson describes himself explicitly in an interview as non-aligned, equating
his position between mainstream and underground camps with the non-aligned
countries of the Cold War.^52 Similarly unrecruitable, yet opposed to the dual
gravitational draw of East and West, were the feminist writers who emerged
with voices liberated by the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and
who were also temperamentally allergic to the Cold War’s male power games and
militarizationofculture.LizLochhead’s‘DreamingFrankenstein’tropestherelation
between women writers and Cold War male violence as that between Mary Shelley
and the monster: ‘She said she|woke up with him|in her head, in her bed.|Her
mother-tongue clung to her mouth’s roof|in terror, dumbing her, and he came
with a name|that was none of her making.’^53 The penetration of the imagination
by male violence and military ideology is here troped as a rape and possession of the
sleeping writer. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) attracted women
poets into strategic non-aligned positions of protest, as with the poems and novels
of Zoe Fairbairns (as well as her poetry editorship of ̈ Spare Rib).^54 Pat Arrowsmith,
organizer of the first Aldermaston march, arrested eleven times for CND protests,
brought out in 1981 a collection of anti-war poems,On the Brink.Bestinthe
collection is ‘View from Orford Castle’, which places the castle’s war-scarred history
of ‘suffering and slaughter’ in proximity with one of the nuclear establishment’s
‘modern forts’, Orford Ness Atomic Weapons Research Establishment testing site
glimpsed on the horizon (‘those mounds are filled|with deadly gadgets that could
tear|the earth to bits’).^55 The historical perspective shifts into the future, and
Arrowsmith can register the ‘taint||of strontium poison permeat[ing] the air’. She
(^52) Peter Robinson, interviewed by Ted Slade, ‘The Poetry Kit Interviews Peter Robinson’,The
Poetry Kit(1999): ‘the non-aligned formal eclecticism I picked up as a student writer has stayed with
me.’ Available at 53 http://www.poetrykit.org/iv/robinson.htm
Liz Lochhead, ‘Dreaming Frankenstein’, in Douglas Dunn (ed.),The Faber Book of Twentieth-
Century Scottish Poetry(London: Faber, 1992), 345–6.
(^54) Fairbairns’s works were concerned with resistance to the patriarchal thinking behind overtly
male technology. As she put it in an essay on the women’s peace movement, they represented a ‘way
of thinking that confronts, subverts and turns away from the deadly ejaculatory intellectualizing of the
war movement, symbolised so neatly in its own creation, the cruise missile’ (Zo ̈e Fairbairns, ‘Taking
it personally’, inPeace Moves: Nuclear Protest in the 1980s: Photographs by Ed Barber, with text by Zoe ̈
Fairbairns and James Cameron (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), 31). 55
Pat Arrowsmith, ‘View from Orford Castle’, inOn the Brink(London: CND, 1981), 13.