unavowed engagement every morning at parade
Hisvolunteers would call backAnseo
And raise their hands
As their names occurred.
The five-line ‘Ireland’ laconically implies that terrorism is more expected than
love in Northern Ireland, or at least in Northern Irish poetry, as a Volkswagen with
its engine ticking over leads ‘You’ to ‘wonder if it’s lovers|And not men hurrying
back|Across two fields and a river’.^30 This evokes the same confusion of which
‘Bang’ makes use, substituting a sexual for a violent scenario. But here, in the
title’s explicit locating of the poem amongst the proliferation of attempts to define
‘Ireland’, and in the inclusive pronoun ‘You’ (which attributes the ‘wondering’ to
both first and second persons, poet and reader), Muldoon himself acknowledges
the plausibility of such confusion, rather than having it seem a product of the
reader’s overheated imagination. But in both ‘Anseo’ and ‘Ireland’ there is still no
narratorial commentary on the state of affairs they portray. Northern Ireland has
become an overt focus of attention, but this is an attention which merely records
telling incidents and perceptions, and does not offer itself as an interpreter of these.
Its neutrality is less disconcerting than that of the fourth sonnet of ‘Armageddon,
Armageddon’, as the events it relates are less close to home, but its affectlessness
is still far from what is expected as a response to such malign circumstances. The
moral ramifications that inevitably, for readers, attend such subject-matter make
the neutrality seem far from truly neutral,but anomalous and mildly disturbing.
Muldoon’snextvolume,Quoof,isevenmoreexplicitlyconcernedwiththeconflict.
AsClairWillsnotes,‘Terroristbombings,armymanoeuvres,shootings,murdersand
reprisals all feature in this volume.’^31 In presenting these, many of the poems share
thedeadpanresponseof‘Anseo’and‘Ireland’.‘TheSightseers’,forexample,contrasts
its octave’s evocation of a pleasingly symmetrical family (‘My father and mother, my
brother and sister’) and their ‘dour best-loved Uncle’ with a sestet that relates uncle
Pat’s experience of sectarian persecution. The family had set out
not to visit some graveyard—one died of shingles,
one of fever, another’s knees turned to jelly—
but the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley,
the first in mid-Ulster.
Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials
had stopped him one night somewhere near Ballygawley
and smashed his bicycle
AndmadehimsingtheSashandcursethePopeofRome.
They held a pistol so hard against his forehead
there was still the mark of an O when he got home.^32(^30) Muldoon, ‘Ireland’, ibid. 82–3.
(^31) Wills,Reading Paul Muldoon(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), 88.
(^32) Muldoon, ‘The Sightseers’, inPoems 1968–1998, 110–11.