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David Boll reviews Heavy Water (Enitharmon £8.95) and Half Life (Heaventree Press £3.99) by Mario Petrucci, and the anthology Wild Reckoning edited by John Burnside and Maurice Riordan (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation £7.50)

Mario Petrucci’s two books are about the aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion and were inspired by Svetlana Alexievitch’s book Voices from Chernobyl which he tells us provided most of the source material. Heavy Water was published first and Half Life contains poems not included in the first book.

   It is hard to write successfully on well-known public events. A poet is faced with the problems of stock responses, of versaturation, of needing to add something worth-while to what has already been conveyed by other media. Petrucci’s approach is to write for the most part clean, straightforward narratives, many of them dramatic narratives by the protagonists, and often in couplet form. The effect is direct and cumulative. The scope of individual human suffering slowly makes itself felt.

   The effect is also somewhat numbing, as most of the poems follow the same approach, and the individual stories end up feeling somewhat repetitive. But there are also less straightforward poems with an added intensity and power of penetration. In The Man Buried with Chernobyl these spring from imaginativeness - envisaging the man as

    imagining himself the corpse at the end of a play
    leaving behind the murdered outline in white carbon.

In Answers the form is not narrative but question and answer:

    Where are we going?
    Where we will send you

    What will we do there?
    What you are told…

The very fine The Breath has a degree of suspense -

    Not impossible is it? Or even
                                Unlikely. That a bus conductor

    Leaned from his step that day, craned
                     East round the corner of his pole

    And took it. Or that a young woman….

What exactly is this ‘it?’ By the end if not before, we know.

   These poems are among the strongest in Heavy Water. Two of the strongest now published in Half Life were included in Magma 29 - Sasha and Rumour.

   Mario Petrucci has written boldly and clearly on a worthwhile theme. He is one of the most prolific, versatile and, at his best, penetrating of our poets. But it is a double-edged gift to be prolific. It often happens that less is more, and the collection as a whole might have done well to use fewer poems and so achieve more of a balance between their different styles, to the benefit of them all.

   Wild Reckoning is an anthology with a particular purpose as explained by the editors. They started planning it in 2002 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and to remind the public of her work. Her book was not just about pesticides, though that element received the most attention, but about a whole attitude to nature at once lyrical and scientific. Thus she brought together two approaches often treated as antithetical. The anthology seeks to be similarly comprehensive, not “nice poems about birds and flowers” but “an attempt to understand, in the fullest sense, what it is to live in the world as humans”.

   The anthology includes 102 poems. Of these, 17 were specially commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation. Conversations were arranged between the chosen poets and individual scientists so as to foster their collaboration, and the poets describe this experience in an interesting series of Notes. Of the remaining 84 poems, 23 are by living poets, and the rest are a fairly wide selection from the poetry of the past.

   As one would expect, some of the commissioned poems show signs of the intended collaboration and some not. There are fine poems among them. John Burnside’s characteristically lyrical and intimate poem has its starting point in catching sight of Arctic char in a bowl. Paul Muldoon contributes a sonnet on the classical story of Glaucus (of Corinth) which has a concision and kick worthy of Cavafy. Mark Doty’s poem on tiny birds flitting around him on a winter’s day has all his patient, scrupulous sensitivity and his ability to find the right form and tone for his subject. Seamus Heaney’s poem on finding a nest with the eggs in it cold and dead has that richness and physicality of language in which he is pre-eminent among the living:

    Early riser busy reaching in
    And used to finding warm eggs. But instead
    This sudden polar stud
    And stigma and dawn stone-circle chill
    In my mortified right hand…

   There are others. Some though are less successful - where the subject seems contrived, where nature is conscientiously observed but somewhat lifeless, or where the poem simply goes on too long.

   Moving to the general anthology, some of its poems will be familiar to most people with an interest in poetry, though very possibly not to the younger among them (Sir Gawain, The Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth’s Nutting, etc). Others are less familiar, with some stimulating surprises. John Clare with four poems has twice as many as anyone else, and one can see why his combination of realism and empathy, springing from the down-to-earth experience of a lifetime, would appeal to the anthologists. The selection differs from nature poetry in general through its refreshing absence of sentimentality, and also through the way in which it concentrates on our observation and experience of the external world, rather than on nature as a source of imagery and analogy for the internal or imaginative. This second characteristic gives it a focus; on the other hand, as with any focus, it also excludes - for example, the rich play between the two aspects which we find in Wallace Stevens.

   The anthology is not unduly didactic. The first few poems deal with the damage man can do to nature, but that is not the exclusive theme. One of these poems illustrates the perils of such an approach, particularly in a country like ours where almost all the landscape has been affected by man. Wordsworth writes to protest against the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway. Many of us now experience the sound and sight of a railway as friendly and enhancing.

   The anthology will appeal to those who respond to its aims and general character, and would enjoy browsing through a wide range of poems of varying degrees of familiarity, plus a few fine new poems.