april warman
The casual, factual tone, sustained throughout, belies the shocking difference of
subject-matterbetween octave and sestet; as far as the speaker is concerned, it seems
that the story of Uncle Pat’s victimization makes for as good entertainment as
‘the brand-new roundabout’. The other attraction on offer, ‘some graveyard’, with
its connotations of family piety, is rejected: the random multiplicity of mortality
cannot hold the attention: ‘—one died of shingles,||one of fever, another’s knees
turned to jelly—’. This last in the catalogue of possible deaths in fact sounds
far from natural—‘knees turned to jelly’ suggests ‘died of fright’, with a possible
allusion to the practice of ‘kneecapping’, infamously associated with Ulster. But
if this shadows an alternative fate for Uncle Pat at the hands of the B-Specials,
then the narrator, it seems, is not interested. As the poem’s title implies, it is
entertainment—the uncanny detail of the O on Uncle Pat’s forehead—that is
valued, not the moral questions raised by such persecution. The affectless tone of
this poem is similar to that which appears in the two poems quoted fromWhy
Brownlee Left; what is unnerving is how much more concerned we feel the speaker
shouldbe by the situation he narrates. It may seem plausible to remain unconcerned
by the history of a classmate’s brutalization by society, but such callousness about
the victimization of a ‘best-loved uncle’ is chilling.
‘Mink’ does not have this disconcerting blend of intimacy and detachment; it
is equally unsettling, however, in that its approach to violence goes beyond the
neutrality of ‘Anseo’ or ‘Ireland’ to a wilful randomness of response that appears
slightly crazed. It makes reference to the murdered IRA infiltrator Robert Nairac
not through the medium of political or moral comment on his fate, or even through
detached factual narrative, but through the arbitrary and irresponsible connections
of rhyme (Nairac/anorak) and material similarity (mink/fur-lined hood). In a
poem of just four impassive lines, a mink escaped from its south Armagh mink
farm ‘is led to the grave of Robert Nairac|by the fur-lined hood of his anorak’.^33
To choose this approach to Nairac is to deny both the political meaning that
Nairac’s death and disappearance carry in Ulster, and the moral connotations that
any murder holds. The indulgence in surrealism suggests a refusal in the narrator
to acknowledge normal, social, responsible reactions, an anarchic declaration of
independence from the requirements and fixities of morality.
However, the meaning that both these poems, and, to a lesser extent, all the
poems I have discussed so far, do carry, inheres in how their determined detachment
is itself open to interpretation. Over the four volumes, the discrepancy between
the affectless tenor of these poems and their inherently shocking subject-matter
becomes increasingly marked, and increasingly requires explanation. Early on, in
the parables ofNew Weatherand the knowing play on expectations ofMules,it
simply suggests a writer reluctant to expose himself, through direct statement,
to political misappropriation. Later, the increasingly anomalous detachment that
(^33) Muldoon, ‘Mink’,Poems 1968–1998, 119.