pointing to east and west operations which it had honed in Burma, Kenya, and Malaya. The Troubles, in
otherwords, had all the hallmarks of a Cold War colonial war brought back ‘home’
within the UK. The poetry of the Troubles, from Fiacc to Muldoon, takes the
strangeness of this on board, partly as though registering the pressure of English
reading eyes.
Padraic Fiacc in his ‘Enemy Encounter’ gazes at a ‘British Army Soldier’,
comically young (could be his daughter’s boyfriend), encountered in the street.
Hesays‘somethingblandtomake[thesoldier]grin’,buttheboystarespastwith
glass eyes, terrified, for ‘I am an Irish man|and he is afraid|That I have come to
kill him.’^63 His ‘The British Connection’ recites a litany of the concealed weapons
in the people’s houses (‘Screws, bolts, nuts, Belfast confetti’), whilst ‘Soldiers’
records the intense social propaganda aimed at young boys to become warriors
in the struggle, the ‘Anna Magnani voice’ screaming: ‘ ‘‘We are the poor|And
the poor have to be ‘soldiers’’.’^64 The bizarre and sinister brutal comedy of the
poems comes from the disconcerting fact that this war has all the features of the
wars the British were normally fighting abroad in the long Cold War for hearts
and minds in the decolonizing Third World: popular Marxist uprising against the
invader (‘ ‘‘the poor have to be ‘soldiers’’ ’), homemade weaponry and bombs, secret
paramilitary training and ideology, racist encounters (‘I am an Irish man|and he
is afraid’).
Seamus Deane foregrounded in coded form the pressure of the Cold War on
Northern Irish lives in ‘A Schooling’: ‘Ice in the school room, listen,|The high
authority of the cold’. The cold of the Cold War is ingested as ideology through the
‘Government milk’ Deane remembers drinking in 1940s Northern Ireland:
the Government milk
I was drinking and my world
All frost and snow, chalk and ice.^65The ‘History Lessons’ at the same allegorical school turn to a dream of Moscow,
Deane remembering watching a film of the burning of Moscow during the Second
World War, again troped as a Cold War education: ‘the sunlight|Stealing over
frost, houses huddled up in|Droves, deep drifts of lost||People.’^66 The long gulp
in the mouth as the voice moves from ‘lost’ to ‘People’ across the stanza break
mimes the shock of the young boy Deane as he recognizes his own people in the
Moscow story. The history of the Russian struggle against fascism and the Cold War
allure of the USSR is colouring the dream of the Troubles, the ‘Elections, hunger
(^63) Padraic Fiacc, ‘Enemy Encounter’, in Frank Ormsby (ed.),Poets from the North of Ireland(Belfast:
Blackstaff, 1990), 94–5. See also Fiacc’s edited anthologyThe Wearing of the Black: An Anthology of
Contemporary Ulster Poetry(Belfast: Blackstaff, 1974).
(^64) Fiacc, ‘The British Connection’ and ‘Soldiers’, in Ormsby (ed.),Poets from the North of Ireland,
93–4 and 92–3. 65
66 Seamus Deane, ‘A Schooling’, ibid. 157–8.
Deane, ‘History Lessons’, inHistory Lessons(Dublin: Gallery, 1983), 10–11.