adam piette
tells us, a policing operation, boosting local reactionary power bases over subject
cultures.^75 Theway the boosting works is a screwing in of the Cold War’s destructive
energies into those cultures’ systems of menace and surveillance. Superpower shores
up micropower; Cuba props up Belfast table-thumping. Muldoon’s cool and comic
scrutinyoftheprocessisadmirableinitsway;itisalsoasclearlyanactofDedalus-like
disengagement. But that disengagement is not peace-seeking and dissident-exiled
as Heaney’s is. It has its own lucid ruthlessness too, coldly analytical as well as wry.
It judges the Cold War (‘from beyond the [iron] curtain’) through imitation of the
voices running it as a system of control (over women, Catholics, Irish poets) down
at the level of the local, of the family voices in each citizen’s head.
If the disengagement of the Northern Irish poets from the Cold War is important,
it is as the end-game of the larger political process, which also terminated itself
with the fizzling out of the old colonial wars of independence and the trumping of
Cold War systems by the ordinary people ‘from beyond the curtain’ inperestroika
and the break-up of the Soviet Union. It also marked the end-game of British
Cold War poetry, from its compromised beginnings as Movement solidarity with
the cold warriors, through imitation of US counter-culture and Soviet dissidents,
pointing to east and west, towards recognition of the real battlegrounds of the Cold
War, the decolonizing cultures at the world’s margins. The high authority of the
cold, as Deane and Muldoon noted, intricately involved all exercise of power in the
provinces of the new world order. Muldoon’s solidarity with his sister(s), however
cool and disengaged, effectively creates a bridge between the folk memory of the
Cold War (which will always centre on the Cuban missile crisis) and engagement
with the anarchist-pacifist resistance of the anti-nuclear women’s movements. Such
bridges are the essential story of Cold War British poetry, for they demonstrate, as
if by imitative praxis, the ways in which the Cold War was finally withstood and
lived over and out at the level of the imagination, however ‘filmed over with the
gray filth of it’, a dream of truce which made the trucehappenin the end.^76
(^75) See also the sonnet sequence ‘Armageddon, Armageddon’ from the 1977 collectionMules,where
the local civil war is keyed in to the larger Cold War ‘zodiac’ of supranational divisions: e.g. the vision
of poisoned wells and fish in Sonnet V, with the ‘Gemini’ forces of the Cold War above: ‘Twin and
Twin at each other’s throats’ (Muldoon, ‘Armageddon, Armageddon V’, inPoems 1968–1998, 70).
(^76) See Muldoon, ‘Truce’, inPoems 1968–1998,86–7.