“12th October, 1994”: On 13th October, 1994 the “Combined Loyalist Military Command” announced a ceasefire in Northern Ireland.
“Bob the Builder Is a Dickhead”: “On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street / Become the figures of heaven,” from Wallace Stevens’s “To An Old Philosopher in Rome.”
“Laganside”: The penultimate stanzas of “Ovid in Tomis” by Derek Mahon read: “Better to contemplate / The blank page / And leave it blank // Than modify / Its substance by / So much as a pen-stroke. // Woven of wood nymphs, / It speaks volumes / No one will ever write.”
“from In Whose Blent Air All Our Compulsions Meet”: The title is from Philip Larkin’s “Church Going.” The three “partly-scrubbed street slogans” presumably read in their original form: “Vote for Sinn Féin,” “Fuck the Pope,” and “God is Good.”
“The Green Rose”: Quotations from Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”
“Scapegoat”: Corned beef is idiomatically termed “corned dog.” Linda Lusardi was a prominent glamour model in the British tabloid press throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s.