Poetry

Atomic Ghosts
Edited by John Bradley
Coffee House Press, 1995, 331 pages

Reviewed by Lou Hillman

It takes an extraordinary perceptiveness to see ghosts. Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan calls ghosts "powerful, inorganic beings" perceived in night's darkness, requiring special awareness and posing special dangers. "Atomic Ghost " is a collection of poems which give voice and image to "the Bomb" as an inorganic being, and explores the possibilities of response to its terrifying presence.

Bradley assembled these 302 poems after a university student asked him, "What is Hiroshima?" "Atomic Ghost" answers not with facts and figures, but with feelings and perceptions, refusing the rational distance required to obliterate innocent civilians.

In the book's preface, Terry Tempest Williams recounts a Yaqui Ceremony called "Throwing Flowers at Evil," and she appropriates this ritual as an act of nuclear resistance. The book itself becomes this kind of ritual, aimed at a style of consciousness which cannot feel the effects of its horrible experiments. It is a positive and life-affirming task to break down this kind of thinking, and "Atomic Ghost" is entirely successful.

If we have ever had any doubts about the ghosts/monsters which human reason makes, we need only consult the poems John Bradley has gathered for us in "Atomic Ghost." Like in Denise Levertov's "Watching Dark Circle," where she writes with disbelief:

... the simulation of hell these men
have carefully set up
is hell itself,

and they in it, dead in their lives,
and what can redeem them? what can redeem them?"

This particular ghost/monster, portrayed by Levertov, is the rational monster of human agency which creates a living hell. The poem wants to perform a kind of curettage to rid us of this monstrosity once and for all.

In "Trying to Talk with a Man," Adrienne Rich takes the notion one step further:

Out in the desert we are testing bombs,
that's why we came here...

Out here I feel more helpless
with you than without you...

talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves
as if we were testing anything else.

Rich is finding "the monster" not only outside in the world, but also inside - as if we all carry a paranoid potential to maim and destroy. Her poem maps this inside/outside and serves to help us avoid its traps.

Gregory Corso's "BOMB" takes an unexpected direction, a "love" of the bomb which ends up clarifying its horrors:

...O Bomb I love you
I want to kiss your clank eat your boom
You are a paean an acme of scream
a lyric hat of Mister Thunder
O resound thy tanky knees
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
BOOM BOOM ye moons ye stars BOOM
nights ye BOOM ye days ye BOOM
BOOM BOOM ye winds ye clouds ye rains. . .