david wheatley
explored by Shapcott are ‘altogether permeated by the media’, but the effect of
thisis ‘hardly one of disorientation or surprise...the irony of [the speaker’s]
insistence on her status as an ‘‘Englishwoman’’ is one-dimensional and obvious’.^13
The exposure of this speaker as a sham merely serves to bolster a controlling
authorial irony, whose heavily flagged superiority to this outbreak of imperialism
under fire the reader can share with minimal effort. The speaker may no longer be
a mere bystander, but the reader remains so, all too comfortably.
Nevertheless, Shapcott’s poem demonstrates the unease that many contemporary
poets have felt with the mediated nature of their subject-matter. Tony Harrison has
also written about the role of media representations of war, as well as contributing
to the mass media with the poetic dispatches he wrote on the Bosnian war for the
front page of theGuardian. A large proportion ofUnder the Clock(2005) is devoted
to political poems, making no apology for their ephemerality in the cause of savage
indignation at the expense of Bush, Blair, and their war on terror. Good poetry
owes no special allegiance to any one form of politics, but the aesthetic strategies
entailed by Harrison’s desire to take a stand make an excellent test case for the
intersection of poetry and politics today.
The BBC comedy seriesI’m Alan Partridgeought to provide an unlikely intertext
for a Tony Harrison poem, but in ‘Watership Alan’ the hapless local DJ is making a
promotional film for barge holidays when farmers antagonized by his comments on
the BSE crisis drop a dead cow on him froma bridge. An airborne dead cow features
in Harrison’s ‘Species Barrier’ too, with all the incongruity ofI’m Alan Partridge
but slightly less comedy. This dead cow is from a press photograph of Afghanistan,
which accompanied the poem’s first publication in theGuardian; the poet wonders
sarcastically whether it might be a ‘food-aid drop’ without a parachute.^14 E. M.
Forster urged us to ‘only connect’, and as Harrison warms to his theme, he connects
the turmoil of post-invasion Afghanistan to other contemporary crises with greedy
but dubious enthusiasm. The year 2001 was also that of the foot-and-mouth crisis,
and in Harrison’s surreal conjunction the dead Afghan cow becomes a victim of the
contiguous culls in which all British animals near an infected farm were slaughtered
and burned. By extension, there is a ‘species barrier’ between the Coalition bombers
and the Afghan peasant farmers far below them. If so, Harrison does nothing to
dismantle it with the (perhaps deliberately) offensive comparison in stanza 3, when
the carcass becomes a ‘maggot Mecca crescendoing with prayer’ that ‘will never
feed the hungry folk who pass’. Humanitarian aid in the service of an invading army
is scarcely less violent than a bombing raid; the Afghans may as well be maggots
for all the Coalition understands their culture. In pursuit of his satirical quarry,
however, Harrison too performs an act of imaginative violence on his Afghan
(^13) Keith Tuma,Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American
Readers(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 198–9.
(^14) Tony Harrison, ‘Species Barrier’, inUnder the Clock: New Poems(Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2005), 9.