The Strange Museum
| By: | Tom Paulin |
| Publisher: | Faber & Faber |
| Published: | January 2002 |
| Pages: | 64 |
| Categories: | Poetry |
| Language: | English |
| Available as: | Paperback |
| On sale at: |
For this poet, history is change. The past is a fundamentalist museum that can hold a society in a deadly stasis which will inevitably be broken by violence. Change should be peaceful, politically intelligent, civilised, but what we have instead are the Troubles. Tom Paulin’s perspective on this deadly imbroglio was unusual. He is born and bred in Ireland, speaks with a Belfast brogue, yet he carries a blue passport. His view is detached, ironic. He is not sympathetic to a politics based on the historic British “right to rule “over the province. Nor does he write from within the angry values of the late 20th century “proddie” community in the North. The former plain Presbyterian grace of life in the six counties has turned sour with the rise of ruthless working class Catholics pressing the case for a United Ireland, by armed struggle if necessary. Unpromising subject matter for poetry, one might think. The pleasure for the reader lies in the wristy language, terse, sometimes shocking, full of unexpected juxtapositions and newly minted words. I see Paulin as a poet with a fierce focus on intolerance and political folly: It’s a limed nest, this place. I see a plain Presbyterian grace sour then harden As a free strenuous spirit changes To a servile defiance that whines and shrieks For the bondage of the letter: it shouts For the big man to lead his wee people To a clean white prison, their scorched tomorrow. Desertmartin in the Liberty Tree
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