‘dichtung und wahrheit’ from an unnamed war zone, and eyewitness accounts of ethnic cleansing of the kind
associatedwith Bosnia and Kosova. The phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ falls under the
heading of what Geoffrey Hill has called ‘atrocities of the tongue’,^25 in the violence
it repeats and enshrines under the cover of media-sanctioned cliche; but rather ́
than dwell on the violence behind such phrases, Harsent refers almost breezily
to a ‘facility for widows’ (the implication being that if the women do not enter
as widows, they certainly emerge as such), as though he meant a social welfare
office: here violence is taken as read, as is the futility of the theatrical indignation
indulged by Harrison and Pinter. Not thatLegionis not brutal and graphic. ‘Chinese
Whispers’ flits from unvarnished atrocity to atrocity in a series of quatrains:
How’s this for a tale of slaughter:
a man who slew his herd, then drew a hood
over the trembling head of each blonde daughter
and shot them where they stood?^26Even here though, Harsent makes much of his detached narrative perspective,
calmly asking us ‘How’s this for a tale of slaughter’, aware of the competition
elsewhere in the same poem, insisting on the rhyme of ‘slaughter’ and ‘daughter’,
and pausing uneasily on small details such as the blondness of the slaughtered girls’
hair. Elsewhere, the sequence is framed by a series of italicized ‘Despatches’ that offer
first-hand but fragmentary descriptions of combat, as though we were listening in
on intercepted radio transmissions. The closer to the bone the experience described
gets, the more resistant the texture of the writing becomes, as though safeguarding
its opacity against the voyeuristic reader who, like the speaker of Shapcott’s ‘Phrase
Book’, would presume to be ‘lost in the action’ too. This is writing that takes active
care to circumvent the reader keen to ‘rampage...permissively in the history of
other people’s sorrows’,^27 as Seamus Heaney once accused Sylvia Plath’s Holocaust-
inflected poetry of doing. A series of ‘Snapshots’ displays the forensic immediacy of
a pathologist’s report, delivered entirely without authorial commentary (‘Troopers
dead in a trench and a river of rats|| ...Lovers dead in bed and a shift of
maggots’^28 ). Observation becomes data retrieval, as in ‘Ghost Archaeology’, where
theblandbureaucraticlanguageof ‘thereels|ofthirty-fivemill,thebuckram-bound
ledgers...the data’^29 conveys perfectly well what the nature of those ‘data’ might be.
Two decades beforeLegion, Christopher Reid publishedKaterina Brac,avolume
written in the voice of a fictional Eastern European writer that made much of
its opportunities for cultural ventriloquism while also satirizing the vogue among
Western poets for writing from the old Eastern bloc, amounting almost to envy
(^25) Hill, ‘History as Poetry’, inCollected Poems, 84.
(^26) David Harsent, ‘Chinese Whispers’, inLegion(London: Faber, 2005), 21.
(^27) Seamus Heaney, ‘The Indefatigable Hoof-Taps: Sylvia Plath’, inThe Government of the Tongue:
The 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings 28 (London: Faber, 1988), 165.
Harsent, ‘Snapshots’, inLegion, 15.^29 Harsent, ‘Ghost Archeology’, ibid. 16.