By Times Literary Supplement | Created at 2024-12-03 18:18:25 | Updated at 2024-12-04 19:33:21
1 day ago
Burning Babylon (2002) – Michael Symmons Roberts’s third collection of poems, in which “The Qualities of Fallout” was published after first appearing in the TLS in 2001 – is a narrative sequence about the controversial Cold War American cruise missile base at Greenham Common, close to where the poet grew up. The collection’s title sets the threat of nuclear annihilation in a Biblical context, finding echoes of the threat of apocalypse in the fall of a legendary city. The base itself becomes a symbol of self-destructive imperial ambition: it was built, as the poet says, “for the end of the world”.
Although Symmons Roberts dislike the term “religious poet”, he does reflect on the world, as Robert Potts has said, “in a way that is informed by a sense of … transcendence”. But he never loses sight of the world in front of his eyes. “Fallout” is the radioactive contamination caused by a nuclear explosion, of course, but it is also, here, a metaphor for the unseen operation of a more benign religious force, “subtle as / that valley rain which drenches / without ever being other than air”. This might also suggest the way poetry touches the world with grace without ever actually altering its appearance, baptising us into a new apprehension of what “half the world” cannot see. The hints are subtle (“Winter solstice. Deep advent … people … led through dry streets”), but the poem ends with “a new subtext”: the fear of nuclear winter, perhaps; or the promise of a guiding “star”.
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?
Is it like cyanide – odourless
to half the world, burnt almonds to the rest?
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.
MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS (2001)
The post ‘The Qualities of Fallout’ appeared first on TLS.
