di Patrick Leech
Testo integrale

Tony Harrison's 'A Cold Coming' was published in the Guardian newspaper in March 1991, but reprinted in the same newspaper in April 2003. It was a comment on a well-known photograph of the "Highway of Death" - the road from Kuwait to Basra in Iraq along which the retreating Iraqi army was attacked and bombed by the U.S. Air Force. Harrison's poem takes the form of an imaginary "exclusive interview" with the "charred" Iraqi soldier of the photograph by a western reporter, in which the "frightening mask" talks of his experience of the war, contrasting this with that of "three wise Marines" From the U.S.A.