david wheatley
of its quality of authentic witness and suffering.Legionissimilarly non-specific in
its references, keeping its local colour purposely vague, from its obscure-sounding
saints, suggestion of religion cross-bred with blood-lust (‘Our Lady of Retribu-
tion’), to evocation of inscrutable peasant ceremonies, as when men file to the
cairn of what might be a murder victim, ‘some in their wedding suits’.^30 Even
in its vagueness, however, there remains an element of risk: why set the book in
Central or Eastern Europe if not to trade on that region’s stereotypical associations
with primitivism and never-ending ethnic strife? How different would those poems
look if Harsent had chosen to set them in a conflict closer to home, such as the
Northern Irish Troubles? John McAuliffe expresses his misgivings when he notes
that Harsent refuses ‘any engagement with the dialectics of war, of history, or
its relation to specific national communities’, and how instead ‘the war seems
motiveless, generic and irremediably foreign’,^31 which sounds uncomfortably close
to Seamus Heaney’sNorth, or some critics’ versions of Heaney’sNorth,inwhich
the reality of conflict, why it happens, and who is to blame, are elided for the sake
of a tableau of mythologized bloodshed and death.
In its defence, the vagueness ofLegionis more than the alibi of a lazy Westerner
watching the horrors of the Bosnian war on the news; its lack of specificity turns
the focus back on the reader, forcing us to confront the inadequacy of the images it
supplies and fill in its gaps for ourselves. In ‘Chinese Whispers’ no tale of atrocity is
without its surrounding haze of doubt and unreliability (‘They told us about...’,
‘News arrived of...’, ‘This one’s got legs...’), tempering our outrage with
reminders of the role of inflammatory disinformation in war. If elsewhere Harsent
shows no emotion in describing real atrocities, any indignation we show here might
turn out to be for massacres that never were. In ‘Sniper’ he adopts the persona
of a gunman concealed in a church tower, ‘kneeling up but looking down, like a
man at prayer’.^32 The sniper surveys a very local theatre of conflict, remembering
the cafe where he drank coffee and played pin-ball, and ‘the girl with Madonna’s ́
face|until she showed her teeth’, her actual ugliness doing double duty for the
‘neighbourly murder[s]’^33 (to invoke Seamus Heaney again) waiting to expose the
ugly side of small-town life. As in Keith Douglas’s ‘How to Kill’, also written from
the perspective of a sniper, the speaker offers no justification for his actions, and is
not about to be deflected from his purpose by excessive humanizing of his targets:
The night-sky floods then clears, flagging a single star,
and the city settles to silence under my peace.
The woman, the child, the granddad, are nothing...or nothing more
than what history can ignore, or love erase.(^30) Harsent, ‘Cairn’, inLegion, 31.
(^31) John McAuliffe, untitled review of Harsent’sLegion,PN Review168, 32/4 (Mar.–Apr. 2005), 61.
(^32) Harsent, ‘Sniper’, inLegion, 32.
(^33) Heaney, ‘Funeral Rites’, inOpened Ground: Poems 1966–1996(London: Faber, 1998), 97.