The Mickey-Mouse Gas Mask

Publication Instance Details #3352

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	War HR & Weapons of Mass Destruction (incl. nuclear)
War / Genocide Referenced	War: Second World War War: Bosnian War War: Unspecified war
Irish Context	The Troubles/Sectarian Tensions (Ireland)
Languages	English
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	The Mickey-Mouse gas mask of the title was created during World War II in response to the threat of chemical warfare. The 'war' alluded to in the poem itself, however, is not specified. The scene of a bombed clubhouse could be a reference to the bombings of Dublin in May 1941, when a cricket clubhouse in the Phoenix Park was damaged. The poem's publication in the anthology Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia (1993) suggests that it is a response to the Bosnian War. The reference to the speaker's 'far-from-clear citizenship', as well as the images of bombed out buildings may be understood as an allusion to the conflict in Northern Ireland. As with other poems by McGuckian in this dataset, eye-witness accounts from other sources are incorporated into her poems. This is a self-reflexive technique that underscores the challenges of literary witnessing.