The Wolf Review
Mario Petrucci
Heavy Water – a poem for Chernobyl
Enitharmon, 2004
Price: £8.95
How can language address disaster? When circumstances require an immediate response, words can often sound anaemic or empty. But, properly meditated, language can acquire weight and flow, offering a new medium through which to see events. This is what Mario Petrucci’s Heavy Water manages.
It’s now almost 20 years since Chernobyl – the name of the place itself describing the explosion at the nuclear reactor complex there – and Petrucci’s ‘poem for Chernobyl’ makes the language around the incident resonant, active again. The imagery in which incidents and characters are realised is the key to this, and the process begins in the first piece, ‘The Man buried at Chernobyl’: ‘map his contours in roentgens, / reconstruct him in glowing 3D’. Vivid though this image is, the man is reconstructed with technology which has also destroyed him, ‘leaving the murdered outline in white carbon’. The idea that people disappear or dissolve inside the sketch of their shape haunts the book. Visiting her husband in hospital, a woman says ‘Every day I encountered a new man’; he became as soft as ‘putty’, like the food she has to cook so thoroughly for him – ‘I boiled / chickens until the bones sagged.’ The man’s ‘black’ skin even ‘cracked like pastry’. People are so much foodstuff, and in a memorable image from another piece, blood ‘separates // like soup’.
As well as food, water forms recurrent images: indeed, water is so heavy that it seeps throughout the book. People are liquid, and radiation passes ‘from / one watery room to the next // down those long corridors / of cells’, while, near the site of the explosion, ‘Every mineshaft pisses itself.’ In the most striking use of the book’s title, a statue of the Virgin Mary weeps and ‘one tear // starts down her cheek – / heavy water’. The icon also suggests how tradition and ritual shift awkwardly after the incident. Guests at a ‘Chernobyl Wedding’ try desperately and poignantly to honour the conventions of the ceremony, but ‘the priest wears a mask’ and ‘the bride’s bouquet is / caught mid-flight’. The ‘cake is sleek and black / and melting’: nothing can hold onto its shape.Gradual breakdown is the cause and effect of these poems, and any attempt to contain the dissolution is futile. A patient who spends his days in ‘an emptied box’ of a room explains that someone:
opened a
box – that cracked idea of
a box – opened it right up and
turned our world – all of this
innocent unwalled world –
into one
Petrucci uses such indentations, enjambment and caesura throughout, often in couplets or triplets, to show a skewed version of the world. These devices echo the breathlessness of victims in pieces such as ‘Breathing’, or the way work becomes arduous and repetitive, wearing people down, like ‘The old women’ who ‘scrub our clothes’ and ‘Bend till their palms / blister, dissolve.’ Their work echoes Lady Macbeth’s – those who experienced the after-effects of the explosion will never be free of its stain, the black of irradiated skin, food, the thorough blackness of photographs.
While the language of the book is never in itself inactive or unimaginative, the reader can still be worn down by the repetitions. Everyone’s experience of suffering is different, but putting them together means the book’s tone is, at its most positive, wryly bleak. Few figures actually stand out as characters, and two that do – in the pieces ‘Goluboy’ and ‘Ivan’ – are anomalies in the book rather than typical of it. The former’s account of himself and his male lover as they both die generates some beautiful imagery, but he veers on sentimentality in his reconciliation with his father. ‘Ivan’, on the other hand, is a soldier who refuses to accept his fate, and stares down an interrogator who shows ‘pity in [his] eyes like small print’. Is this perhaps Petrucci’s way of representing the writer, acknowledging that a poem may seem like ‘small print’ in response to the event? Another piece, ‘This’, suggests that any account ‘is something you cannot write’ – and yet the figure described still ‘drives ink / across those white steppes of journals’, as though compelled.
Petrucci drives through as well, beyond the end of the line, across pages, people, boundaries, until the book has built up its own kind of critical mass. In the ‘Envoy’, the victims speak to the narrator, bidding ‘Take our words. Enrich them’. Compared with the incident itself, the words cannot be as powerful; there is no explosion. However, with his words in mind, Petrucci tells us:
One night – in early darkness. When you are
thinking of something else. It will escape.
Page(s) 42-43
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