"Words from Chernobyl"

A Note on "Words from Chernobyl" from Tom Sleigh:

"Words from Chernobyl” takes off from "Voices from Chernobyl" by the Belarus oral historian, Svetlana Alexievich. Her book is an edited series of interviews with ordinary Chernobyl citizens, and soldiers, scientists, and health care workers who were ordered or volunteered to help in the “clean up” of the Chernobyl power plant when it melted down and exploded in 1986. Surrounding the plant for the past thirty-five years is an officially mandated, uninhabited, thousand-square-mile area sometimes called the Zone of Alienation—an accurate description, I think, of the psychological and biological conundrums and paradoxes the poem describes. The eight line stanzas all use terminal slant rhyme—a way to order, at least for me, the strangeness of the witnesses’ perceptions.

If you’ve ever seen the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, it seems weirdly prophetic—the Stalker leads a writer and a professor through a post-apocalyptic disaster zone to an enigmatic Room where one’s most deeply held desires are said to be fulfilled. In contrast, in 2012, the French street artist, Combo, installed in one of the many abandoned buildings at the actual Chernobyl a floor-to-ceiling mural of the Simpsons having a picnic while in the background the stacks of the nuclear power plant where Homer works release ominous green and yellow plumes of smoke into the cloudless blue skies. The battered and blistered Room is piled high with thousands upon thousands of contaminated HazMat respirators covering every inch of floor.