Sherry Chandler

H/T to Terry, who’s a sonnet.

Olya
(Chernobyl, 1986)

Little woman the nurses called her –
for the way she brought a lifetime’s grace

to a child’s demeanour, how when she
danced she hardly parted those feet –

her small weight so subtle from ball
to arch, heels barely lifting for each

quick surge she sent up her spine to
fountain arms and sprinkle fingers.

Later she began to move like that doe
they filmed returning from the Reactor:

skinny and slowed into some other,
parallel time. …

— Mario Petrucci (from Selected Poems at The Other Voices International Project)

According to his online CV, Mario Petrucci originally graduated in Physics at Cambridge and later taught science in a secondary school. He gained a PhD in opto-electronics at University College London, and more recently completed postgraduate studies in the Environment and Literature departments of Middlesex University. He has also been an organic farm-hand in Ireland and a one-man band on the Paris Metro.

In 1999, he was the first poet in residence at the UK’s Imperial War Museum, where he developed a sort of vispo poetry hunt called “Search and Create.” His collection Heavy Water (Enitharmon Press, 2004), based on eyewitness accounts of the Chernobyl disaster, won the Daily Telegraph/Arvon International Poetry Competition. In xxxx, he published a translation of Catullus.

In his 2002 essay Poetry in Crisis?, Petrucci had this to say about the current state of poetry:

Is poetry thriving, or in the doldrums? It’s a difficult question to answer. There’s no doubt that it can rise to the surface at times of social crisis or personal stress. It is, after all, perhaps the most compressed form of rhetoric. Poetry is concise. (There are notable exceptions.) It can be intense, immediate, quick, democratic. ‘Democratic’ because anyone can pick up a pencil and jot a couple of lines to express how they feel. … At its worst, the poem is the clangour of consensus and cliché; at its best, it rings of universality and human community.

Consensus finally went out of the window with the First World War. And it was poetry that helped to fuel conflict and dissent. In many ways, it was a natural form for the duckboards. Poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon wrote letters and poems in the Trenches, but the survivors constructed novels and plays. The poem is still the convenient receptacle for the snatched observation, the critical moment, the impromptu declaration. If you’re suffering bombardment, if you’ve just heard Princess Diana has died, if you watch a tower with people still in it collapse, or hear that war has just been declared, you don’t reach for your British Library card. You lift your camera, camcorder or notepad.

…The West is in an age of materialism, and in materialism one thing leads to another. Much of the best poetry stands against that tendency, against the obvious. Poetry therefore offers the alternative view when people need it - the intense moment intensely rendered - but consequently it can never become entirely mainstream. Poetry-for-everyone is rarely poetry at all - it is more often a reversion to doggerel, prose or bad journalism. And the web offers little salvation in this. There is something vulnerable, impassioned and almost sacred about ascribing your thoughts to a sheet (and sometimes a scrap) of paper. That’s what happened in the Trenches…

The poem below was written in September 2001:

LATE SEPTEMBER
(after Bertolt Brecht, ‘Spring 1938′)

There’d been dew. Maybe a light rain.
And a blot drew my eye to that plot of light
through my kitchen window. Closer. I saw

the pincer legs measure out each wire. That
pause of the abdomen before it dipped
to spot-weld each link. I took a chair outside

to stand on. Craned. I wanted to live.
It let me brush a fingertip across the brown
velvet of its back, against the nap, and again

until it froze mid-air, eight legs outstretched
still as a child roused from a trance of play.
There - the same creature I’d raise a slipper to,

flay across carpet to end in a smudge.
I wouldn’t have it in my hand. In my hair.
Yet it - she - went to all that length to snare…

— Mario Petrucci.

Read this poem in its entirety or listen to a reading of it here.