Hedge School

Publication Instance Details #1803

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	Yes	No	No	No

Details

Human Rights Issues	Terrorism/War on Terror Torture
War / Genocide Referenced	War: Global War on Terrorism
Irish Context	Other
Languages	English
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	This one-sentence sonnet is a fast-changing meditation on education (secret and public), love, and different kinds of displacement or 'metastasis': physical, mental, and etymological. In the context of education and grammatical conjugation, the poem mentions 'Guantánamo' (oddly paired with 'amas, amat', the Latin for I love, you love), as the speaker imagines his daughter in her 'all-American Latin class' conjugating the word. But 'Guantánamo' is now associated with the displacement of detainees of the post-9/11 'War on Terror' to the controversial Navy Base - a metastasis that strips them of constitutional rights they would be privy to on U.S. soil. The meaning of the aborigine Taíno word 'Guantánamo', land between rivers, is also evoked here. In the same context, the poem refers to Shakespeare's 'A Comedy of Errors', to a line from Luciana's elucidation of what binds men, women, and other animals.