‘dichtung und wahrheit’ There might be an echo in Harsent’s line of Tacitus’s mordant observation of the
Romanlegions, thatubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant(where they make a
wilderness they call it peace). The poem achieves ‘peace’, but a killer’s peace, and
unlike poems of Pinter’s written from a similar position, does so without a taint
of sarcasm. InA Vision, Yeats expressed a desire for his work to ‘hold in a single
thought reality and justice’;^34 andwhileHarsent’sworkachievesnosuchunity,it
refuses to relinquish its artistic balance, even asthe gross evil of the sniper’s crimes
discredits any ‘justice’ on his terms. Obscene as the word ‘peace’ sounds on his lips,
the sniper articulates the trauma of war in a manner that holds reality and artistic
justice in a single thought, while leaving us in no doubt as to the actual cruelty and
evil the poem embodies.
The true element of the war poem, I would argue, is the shortfall between artistic
and actual justice, the justice it does to its own material and the human justice
it cannot deliver, a gap the writer can choose to explore with full artistic honesty
or evade through self-deception and wish-fulfilment. It has not been my objective
to set up Harsent as the exemplary contemporary British poet of conflict: the
reality is that the recent wars in Europe and the Middle East have not produced
a single self-evident British or Irish ‘war poet’ for our times, or at least not in the
mechanical way that anthologies such asPoets Against the Warassume war poetry
can be produced, to order; and this is to be neither celebrated nor deplored. It is
simply the truth of artistic inspiration and artistic choice. More than thirty years of
the Northern Irish Troubles, it is worth remembering, produced a negligible tally
of poems on that subject by writers from parts of the United Kingdom other than
Northern Ireland itself, and it is just as fatuous to condemn British writers for their
dereliction of duty as it is to see Mahon, Heaney, and Longley as ‘Troubles’ poets
and nothing else. The sequence on war forms only one of three parts ofLegion:
barbarically, there remain other poems to be written, about standing stones in
Devon, and music and paintings, even as Fred Johnston would haul the war poet
back to the more important business of screaming.
Perhaps the greatest war poet of our time is Geoffrey Hill, whose remarkable
recent sequence of books beginning withCanaanin 1996 is haunted by childhood
memories of warfare, and the noises off of more recent conflicts too; but from the
point of view ofPoets Against the Warthese books would hardly qualify as war poetry
at all. Other writers deserving an honourable mention include Michael Longley for
the sequence of volumes beginning withGorse Firesin 1991, Jorie Graham, whose
Overlord(2005) returns to the Allied invasion of Europe by way of reimagining the
present, and in a more fractured and disorienting vein, Keston Sutherland’sNeocosis
(2005). What is common to all these writers, in the words of Samuel Beckett’s radio
talk ‘The Capital of the Ruins’, written out of his post-war experiences with the
(^34) W. B. Yeats,A Vision(London: Macmillan, 1937), 25.