‘dichtung und wahrheit’ scene. What, in reality, do the invasion of Afghanistan and the foot-and-mouth
crisishave in common? Not very much, if truth be told. The juxtaposition of
slaughtered healthy animals in Britain and the disastrous loss of ‘An Afghan’s total
herd’ makes a powerful image, even as the comparison is strained; but rather than
ponder the tenuousness of the connection, Harrison can only force it home in
lines remarkable for their clogged alliteration and bumptious failure to scan. This
is Brechtianplumpes Denkenas crude as any Middle-Eastern oil:
An Afghan’s total herd like some gunned stray
from culled Cumbria dumped on Kabul,
the colluding cabinet of the hooked UK
still committing its ‘contiguous cull’.In his poem ‘Laureate’s Block’, written after the death of Ted Hughes in 1998,
Harrison pre-emptively rejects the laureateship, though his spurning of a job he
had not in fact been offered could not help but seem tetchily self-righteous. This
rhetorical short circuit, as his indignation pre-empts a more complex reality with
which the poem might otherwise have to engage, is a constant feature of Harrison’s
anti-war work.Under the Clockbegins with a series of quatrains, ‘The Krieg
Anthology’, whose one-note satire consists of lurid, shrieking atrocity coupled with
Spitting Image-style portraits of Bush and Blair. Poems about bombs dropped on
children can hardly be expected to observe Augustan proprieties, but it should at
least trouble the reader that Iraqis feature in these poems as dead babies, bomb
victims, and nothing else. It is a literally infantilizing picture. Nor should a satirist be
expected to deliver balance; but the fact that Saddam Hussein does not feature at all
in these poems (even as a West-supported stooge) only adds to the leftist orientalism
of Harrison’s project, not unlike that of Michael Moore’sFahrenheit 9/11.
If Western aggressors are omnipresent in ‘The Krieg Anthology’, ‘11 Septem-
ber 2001’, dedicated to the poet’s son ‘in Cyprus’, is entirely free of any sense
of agency, of what has happened to whom or why, contenting itself with a
passing reference to British army manœuvres on Cyprus and ‘an island divided|by
bankrupt religions|both bred in the desert’.^15 His ‘curse on both your houses’
even-handedness is an attractive proposition from the comfortable distance of a
Mediterranean island (even one as conflict-torn as Cyprus), but the impossibility
of such a style carrying over to ‘The Krieg Anthology’ exposes a painful limitation
in Harrison’s political verse. Not for nothing is his other poem on September 11
entitled ‘Gaps’, with its closing image of a photograph of the poet’s son and father
takeninNewYork:
bright New York winter sun between two showers
shining on both of them, and in between
the World Trade Center’s unbombarded towers.^16(^15) Harrison, ‘11 September 2001’, ibid. 19. (^16) Harrison, ‘Gaps’, ibid. 12.