Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Times change, terrors change. The title ‘Ground Zero’ in this collection about Greenham and Cruise missiles has now acquired another meaning for terror. But the terror of then (and now, in fact) - unthinkable nuclear devastation and the ever-presence of radioactivity - captures that time when the US airbase at Greenham Common became a nuclear missile base. The protagonists of this account - treated with surreal dispassion - are the departing pilots, the remaining military, the peace camp women, the locals, one particular family and its friends highlighted. This well-rehearsed scenario of evil and good is dangerous territory for the poet: the task is to convey the unthinkable, the icy terror at the heart of things, but to eschew polemic. These poems tread that icy line without falter. And it ranks in power with that other treatment of the unthinkable, Russell Hoban’s ‘Ridley Walker’ as it attends to the unthinkable in the heart of the bland countryside of the Home Counties. Here is ‘Ground Zero’:

after that, opinion split: some thought we’d
hear the impact, rush to windows, be
                                                   transfigured
before we were vaporised...
...romantics spoke of hot flesh curling
off the bone like slow-cooked roast, but
                                                           knifeless...
...for purists, this undersold the light,
which would create in one split-second
starburst, worlds of glass beyond all melt and
                                                              scorch.
We would be translucent statues of ourselves:

an instant ice Pompei...

and here ‘The Qualities of Fallout’:

Would it be conspicuous as snowflakes,
only white-hot? Or subtle as

that valley rain, which drenches
without ever being other than air?

... Winter solstice. Deep advent.
Darkness is thicker than ever;

people are led through dry streets
by their dogs and their troubles,

and there is a new subtext to the sky,
something of cobweb, salt and star.

Another presence infiltrates the poems in the form of quotations from a local natural history magazines prefacing the sections. This deals with the flora and fauna of the area and the way it changes and adapts to this alien presence, indeed flourishes. Unstated is the intimation that humans will not, or if any do they’ll be returned to a Stone Age like Russell Hoban’s. This brief review can’t do justice to the sheer scope and controlled brilliance of this collection. You have to read it.

     I gather from the blurb that Symmons is a Christian writer and this fact enhances the bleakness of those poems that record the tatters of Christianity in the shape of the puzzled army chaplain and the fluorescent Star of Bethlehem pinned to a water tower for the Christmas season: “a radio-active angel/glowing in the northern sky” that the women take down and trash, “it broke into a plague of fireflies in the grass”. I see little hope of redemption behind these poems, only a fastidious commitment to recording what was. What probably still is. It’s a tour de force.