In focusing on a single historic event so much a part of pop culture that it has become a cliché, even if the event itself may be of doubtful authenticity according to historians expert in the settling of New York state, “Selling Manhattan” uses that (in)famous land deal to bring together two apparently-unrelated hot-button issues facing Duffy’s fin-de-millennium culture: the harsh reality of ethnic cleansing and its impact on the integrity of a culture’s identity, and the relentless development of the land (and sea) and its catastrophic impact on the environment.

The poem is most obviously about the conflict between two radically-different cultures: the Indigenous populations, separate and distinct nations that were often perceived by European settlers as a single entity, against the invading Europeans. The two groups share no common culture, no common history, no common religion, not even a common language. As world history, with its chronicles of colonialism and exploitation, testifies, different cultures actually sharing a land mass equally rarely happens.

At the troubling emotional core of ethnic cleansing is the disrespect a dominant culture feels toward the so-called “lesser” cultures that it feeds upon and willfully and arrogantly dismantles. Duffy’s focus, the two-centuries long assault on Indigenous cultures by the ever-expanding and unapologetically-rapacious European settlers, is far from the only expression of ethnic cleansing.