david wheatley
The irony here is that, even as Harrison comes up against his inability to depict a
terroristattack in the same cartoon style he reserves for Blair and Bush, ‘Gaps’ is in
fact, and possibly for that very reason, a far superior poem to most of the rest of
Under the Clock.
Harrison reaches his nadir in the longest poem in ‘The Krieg Anthology’, ‘Holy
Tony’s Prayer’, in which a humbug Prime Minister complains that Ali Ismail Abbas
(the Iraqi boy who lost his arms and legs in a bombing raid) is a ‘sick Iraqi PR coup,’
and suggests putting about the story that he has been deliberately mutilated by his
own people. Tony Blair’s oily religiosity is not an attractive trait, but Harrison’s
depictions of it barely rise above the sub-adolescent: ‘I unleash terror without
taint|a sort of (dare one say it?) saint!|Miraculous! No moral mire|soils my
immaculate attire.’^17 The grain of truth to Harrison’s outrage is undeniable: the
mutilated Iraqi boy is being abused a second time over in providing the Western
media with a sentimental good news story. There was, presumably, no such sop
to Iraqi Kurds’ feelings after Saddam Hussein’s gas attack on Halabja, and the
difference that this suggests between naked fascism and the more PR-conscious
type might form the basis for an interesting political poem. But this is emphatically
not it. In (Harrison’s) Blair’s fantasies of the Iraqis mutilating the boy themselves
there is almost a desire for the Coalition to be even more ruthless and bloodthirsty
than it is, the better to absorb the full extent of the poet’s projections of absolute
evil. In this he dovetails neatly with the Pinter of ‘American Football’: if the
target is not quite malign enough, then the poet must make it so. The resulting
poems are deeply flawed, not because they contain too much politics but, among
other reasons, because they contain too little. Harrison has confused explicitness
and effect, doggerel artlessness and accessibility, his enemy’s evil and his own
righteousness.
Mention of Pinter here leads to the other most prominent contemporary British
anti-war poet. The genius of Pinter plays such asThe CaretakerandThe Birthday
Partyis their studied yet vague menace: what has Stanley Webber done, inThe
Birthday Party, to merit his terrifying ordeal at the hands of Goldberg and McCann?
It is impossible to say, yet therein lies the strength of the play. Pinter’s poetry,
by contrast, could not be more peremptory in its certainties. Poems such as ‘God
Bless America’, ‘Democracy’, ‘American Football’, and ‘The ‘‘Special Relationship’’ ’
conjure a vision of yee-haw apocalypse mandated by religious bigotry and blood-
lust. The mysterious sadism ofThe Birthday Partybecomes very unambiguous US
triumphalism:
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.(^17) Harrison, ‘Holy Tony’s Prayer’, inUnder the Clock: New Poems,4.