In “The Chester Zoo Marmot Movement”, is “I have a dream” consciously quoted from Martin Luther King?
Yup. And the phrase “there’s no such thing as society” was uttered by the unspeakable Margaret Thatcher. There are a lot of political poems in Selected because they were written during the 80s when I seemed to be constantly angry about politics. I was a trade union branch secretary then, busily being the enemy within on picket lines, and a lot of poems I wrote did turn out political. I’m not very happy with most of them now because I don’t find them subtle enough – if I write “message” poems now, I try to bury the message more. “Marmots” is one of the few I still have some time for. Thatcher turns up in “InterCity Lullaby” too; she’s the witch.
