pointing to east and west The escape is partly an escape from all involvement in war poetry because of
therisk of the accusation of vulturism, as ‘The First Flight’ admits: ‘I was mired
in attachment|until they began to pronounce me|a feeder off battlefields.’^70 That
attachment to the Catholic community tied Heaney up into a necessarily senti-
mental attitude to the spectacle of violence: the voice of his shot cousin in ‘Station
Island’ accuses him of having ‘saccharined my death with morning dew’.^71 But
equally, Heaney, like Deane, identifies escape as the inner emigration or flight of the
imagination because of its prehistory in dissidentwriting from the Soviet Union, the
boy running from the cities burning in ColdWar’s winter. This is partly the point
of his essay on Mandelstam inPreoccupations,^72 as well as the Mandelstam reference
in ‘Exposure’: ‘As I sit weighing and weighing|My responsibletristia.|For what?
For the ear? For the people?’^73 But unlike the cold warriors who managed their
allusions to Soviet dissident poetry to screw up their courage in the unreal war, here
Heaney leans on Mandelstam both to identify the Northern Irish predicament as a
version of the Cold War fought abroad, but also for support for the act of exile from
the war as such (as into a space where all political questions are blank—‘For the
people?’). Mandelstam’s internal and real exile to Voronezh becomes a governing
trope to justify disengagement.
Disengagement of a very different kind seems to be the convoluted point to
Muldoon’s poetry about the Cold War connection. In ‘Cuba’, Muldoon remembers
the news breaking of the Cuban missile crisis, and the ways it was communicated
to the Irish Catholic home, his father pounding the table, using the threat of ‘ ‘‘the
world at war, if not at an end’’ ’ to scare his daughter into submission, boasting of
Kennedy as ‘ ‘‘nearly an Irishman’’ ’, but only in so far as this means ‘ ‘‘he’s not much
better than ourselves’’ ’, therefore capable of blurting out Armageddon (‘ ‘‘And him
with only to say the word’’ ’), so say your prayers. Whilst the young Muldoon
ponders his father’s politics and the end of the world, his sister May is forced to go
into details when confessing to a mild sexual encounter ‘from beyond the curtain’.^74
The whole episode is draped in disguising, trivializing comedy, yet sparkles with
suggestion of the impact of the wider world of geopolitical warfare upon the
domestic power games within the Northern Irish family unit. The pressure of the
patriarch on the family may be theologically bullying and sexually prurient: its real
power is modelled on the presidential power of the casual destructive word, Cold
War apocalypse as interpellative back-up to the father’s voice. More insinuatingly,
the episode functions as a tiny allegorical drama. The Cold War is, the poem
(^70) Heaney, ‘The First Flight’, ibid. 274. (^71) Heaney, ‘Station Island’, ibid. 261.
(^72) Heaney, ‘Faith, Hope and Poetry: Osip Mandelstam’, inPreoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978
(London: Faber, 1980), 217–20.
(^73) Heaney, ‘Exposure’, 144.
(^74) Muldoon, ‘Cuba’, inPoems 1968–1998(London: Faber, 2001), 78–9. First published as ‘Cuba,
1962’ in 1978. Tim Kendall, quoting a 1982 interview, notes that ‘Muldoon has laconically recalled
that during the Cuban missile crisis the queue for the confessional in his local church was longer than
ever’ (Kendall,Paul Muldoon(Bridgend: Seren, 1996), 75).