70 contemporary poetry
infi ltrate everyday life drawing attention to ‘land of password,
handgrip, wink and nod / of open minds as open as a trap’ (p. 55 ).
To this effect Heaney has seen his role less as claiming political
leadership than as remaining witness to:
Poetry’s solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the victim-
ized, and the under-privileged. The witness is any fi gure in
whom the truth-telling urge and the compulsion to identify
with the oppressed becomes necessarily integral with the act
of writing itself.^32The fi nal poem in North, ‘Exposure’, displays the poet’s position as
a marginal spectator. He comments ruefully upon ‘My responsible
tristia’ (p. 67 ), notoriously describing the poet as ‘neither internee
nor informer’ but as ‘an inner émigré’ who has ‘escaped from the
massacre’ (p. 68 ).
Published in the same year, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’
is one of the key poems from Derek Mahon’s volume The Snow
Party. Mahon’s approach towards the political landscape in Ireland
is deliberately circumspect. The poem interrogates suffering, vio-
lence and the premise of ethical representation through poetry.
Starting from a global map of human suffering, the poem addresses
the haunting of Peruvian mines and Indian compounds to settle
upon a shed in County Wexford. Here a ‘thousand mushrooms
crowd to a keyhole’ having learned ‘patience and silence’.^33 The
mushrooms in this foetid environment serve as an imagining of the
imprisoned and censored. Their patient waiting is seen as out of
sync with the march of history and political discussion since they
wait ‘for us’ since ‘civil war days’ (p. 89 ). Edna Longley poses that
Mahon’s poem ‘does more than translate a defeated community
into the narrative of history or even a lost people into symbolic sal-
vation... He receives a defenceless spirit into the protectorate of
poetry.’^34 The mushrooms may function as reminders of prisoners
of conscience, and certainly Mahon’s poem places a dubious focus
on the ‘the fl ash-bulb fi ring-squad we wake them with’ (p. 90 ).
Mahon extends this community of suffering to a trans-historical
one, identifying it with the holocaust victims of Treblinka and the
‘lost people of Pompeii’ (p. 90 ). Questions regarding an ethics of