Exacting World: Individual Poetry Collections

Abstract

Harold Pinter’s short collection of poems, War — which Paterson was to denounce as a ‘big sweary outburst’ — appeared in June 2003. It contained six poems already published in newspapers between August 2002 and March 2003 (during the build-up towards invasion), one from the 1991 Gulf War period (the controversial ‘American Football’) and one from 1997, and the text of a brief speech delivered in Turin in 2002. The ‘Turin Speech’, which decried the various iniquities of the United States’s foreign policy, works as a sort of framing device for the collection. Pinter had made other similar public observations in the interim. Notably, during the 15 February 2003 peace marches in London he issued a characteristically scathing statement (BBC 2003a) on the US and UK governments’ interventions in other countries. A poetry reading by Pinter to mark the appearance of War at the National Theatre, London, on 10 June 2003 was followed by a conversation with Michael Billington during which he compared the US’s foreign policy to that of ‘Nazi Germany’ and dubbed British Prime Minister Tony Blair a ‘deluded idiot’ (Chrisafis and Tilden 2003). There was no mistaking the political sentiments underlying War. Reviewers and literary critics queued up to savage the collection, usually with an air of taking issue with its poetic qualities rather than its political purpose.