Janey Mac Goes to War

War, as everyone will attest to, is horrific. Yet we continue to indulge in it under the guise of ‘defence’ or ‘peace keeping’ or whatever. And we continue to glorify the stupidity of war (there can be no other term to be applied to Paschendale or Balaclava or Gallipoli or ‘weapons-of-mass-destruction’ Baghdad) with our annual parades and our demonstrations of patriotism and our pontifications on sacrifice and honour and moral debt, while learning nothing more than new ways to destroy. Janey Mac goes to war on war. And not just the boys’ game of war, but the war closer to home: the war in the home, the war that has always existed in the male’s attempt at domination over the female. War is more than one nation’s land grab for oil or for power or for eco-political gain. It is fought daily on an individual level and the vanquished are often those without a voice, without an ally. Janey Mac tries to illuminate the wars that go unreported, as well as those that are reported in a way reminiscent of earlier poets, but at the same time, with a new eye. Lyrical poetry, this is not: it is narrative poetry and prose hoping for a lyrical response.