Bitter harvest ... Chernobyl, April 2006
Photograph: AP
Twenty years after the Chernobyl disaster Sarah Maguire, shortlisted for last year's Forward prize for Best Single Poem, remembers the fear and paranoia of the Cold War, and describes how her poem about the accident, "May Day 1986", reprinted below, came about.
At the very end of April 1986, the first, confusing reports were beginning to reach the West that a cataclysmic nuclear disaster had occurred in Ukraine. Like most people here, I was transfixed by the news of this invisible cloud of intense radioactivity drifting westwards across northern Europe. The absolute uncertainty of what was going on, and what the consequences might be was chilling. But I was particularly worried because a close friend was living right where the fallout was predicted to be especially deadly, Silesia in western Poland. How should a poet living a privileged life in a western democracy respond to an event of such overwhelming power?
I wrote "May Day, 1986" that very day as a way of thinking about that problem. The poem begins with a weather report. Ever since I started reading The Guardian, when I began work as a gardener in 1974, I've been fascinated by the international weather reports. I vividly remember reading the weather report for May 1, and being struck by the thought that I'd experienced the same kind of weather as my friend Tadeusz Slawek in Poland. And yet how little else our worlds had in common.
I was sitting outside in a garden in Norwich (I was a second-year undergraduate at UEA reading English) drinking gin and watching the lights come on indoors. I had no idea what kind of day Tadeusz could possibly be having because, in those days, contact with people in the Eastern Bloc was very fraught: letters were censored ("one page torn by an earlier reader"), phone calls, if they could be made at all, overheard.
One of the important ways in which poems do their work is through the juxtaposition of very different registers of experience. In writing the poem, I realised that all I could 'do' as a lyric poet in response to this extraordinary event was to simply record what was happening to me. The conventions of lyric poetry, in which the consciousness of the poet becomes the subject of the poem, allow me to do that.
The crucial thing, of course, is the consciousness of the poet, and how they understand their subjectivity. Is it something hermetic and "personal" (as we're encouraged to think of our personal lives), or are we also historical and political subjects? Many poems attempt to explore that issue, they attempt to discover the connections that exist between people and things, even when they appear to be entirely separate in order to challenge and subvert those seeming disconnections.
Strange to think back on myself, twenty years ago. I was just starting to write poetry. "May Day, 1986" was the second poem I had published, appearing in the London Review of Books a few weeks afterwards. I wrote, and still write, with doubt and reluctance, because of these issues I've discussed, issues that still trouble me. As they should. I'll leave you to consider how the world has changed these past two decades. And how little it's changed. How the air we breathe is still so uncertain.
May Day, 1986
(for Tadeusz Slawek)
Yesterday, the weather in Warsaw was the same as London's: Sunny, 18' (sixty-four Fahrenheit). I am sitting in a walled garden drinking gin, the fading sky as blue as this tonic water loosening its bubbles against the flat ice.
What is in the air? The first midges; a television three doors down, its hum like this lone bat avoiding the walnut tree. A dog barks. In other houses lights come on - the street an Advent Calendar opening its doors. This house is in darkness,
its seven windows admitting the night. I'm trying to read Mansfield Park, to learn how Fanny finds love and a mansion through keeping silence. All week the weather report has plotted the wind leaving Chernobyl with its freight
of fall-out: cancer settling on Poland - the radio-activity an inaudible fizz in the cells, rupturing thorax or liver, the intimacy of the bowel. They say it won't reach here. I stare at the sky till all I can see are the dead cells of my eyes,
jumping and falling. It's too dark to read - only the flare of a late Kerria japonica, trained to the wall. I think of your letter in my drawer with the handkerchiefs, one page torn by an earlier reader. Socrates distrusted writing, its distance from
the grain of the voice. I come indoors to write you all the things I couldn't say a year ago. Later, on the news, they will show gallons of contaminated Polish milk swilled into sewage, a boy crying at the sting of iodine he must swallow
against the uncertain air.
© Sarah Maguire
· From Spilt Milk (London; Secker & Warburg, 1991). Sarah Maguire is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre at SOAS. Her fourth collection of poetry, The Pomegranates of Kandahar will be published in 2007
