politics and poetics 71representation are posed in the poem since voices beg for us ‘To
do something, to speak on their behalf / or at least not to close the
door again’ (p. 90 ). ‘A Disused Shed in Co Wexford’ frames the
necessity of writing as a response to and articulation of the suffer-
ing of others, but warns that the representation of that suffering is
of key concern in considering political responsiveness.
Interviewed in 1985 , Paul Muldoon responded to a question
on the relationship between politics and his poetry with the retort
‘It doesn’t matter where I stand politically, with a small “p” in
terms of Irish politics. My opinion about what should happen
in Northern Ireland is no more valuable than yours.’^35 Quixotic
and ludic, Muldoon’s ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ in Quoof refuses
to remain still. He creates a space where memories of cultivation
compete with drug taking, news headlines and the dirty protest
in the H Block. While these intersecting narratives refute a politi-
cal positioning, the poem can be read intertextually. We can see
a useful continuity between Muldoon’s work and Mahon’s ‘A
Disused Shed in Co Wexford’. Set in a loose fi ve-sonnet sequence,
Muldoon revisions an agrarian idyll by situating the pastoral in
a hallucinatory psilocybin haze. There is also reference to para-
military violence with the recollection of the IRA fi rebombing of
Malone House, Belfast in 1976. ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ from
Quoof features recollections of his father cultivating mushrooms,
playfully depicting him as one of the mythic ‘ancient warriors /
before the rising tide’ (p. 8 ). However, the play of the poem shifts
in the closing sonnet where reverberating political images surface.
Ventriloquised through a hallucinating friend the speaker recalls
a voice which begs ‘Come back to us’ (p. 9 ). Framed in a prison
where ‘beyond this concrete wall is a wall of concrete and barbed wire’
(p. 9 ) the poem graphically evokes images of the H Block republi-
can prisoners’ dirty protests of the late 1970 s and the hunger strik-
ers of the early 1980 s. The voice urges the poet that his song must
be of ‘treading your own dung’ (p. 9 ). A gradual fading of the scene
in a ‘soiled grey blanket of Irish rain / that will one day, bleach itself
white’ (p. 9 ) paces the gradual emaciation of the prisoner to death.
Muldoon challenges any deliberate intention to respond to
Mahon’s poem. When asked about the allusions common to both
poems he responds: