pointing to east and west wrote the poem in 1975 on the thirtieth anniversary of Hiroshima—a picture of
devastatedHiroshima is on the facing page of the CND edition.
Denise Levertov’s poem ‘Talk in the Dark’ takes an anarchist view of the jostling
between nuclear powers and doves and hawks, here in the poem as rival arguing
voices in dialogue; it appears on the excellent Peace Pledge Union Poetry and War
website:^56
Now it’s to be a mass death.
Mass graves, says one, are nothing new.
No, says another, but this time there’ll be no graves,
all the dead will lie where they fall.
·······
I want to live, says another, but where can I live
if the world is gone?Keyedintotheimportantsub-genreofAmericannuclearpoetry,^57 Levertov’spoems
speak from the impossible post-mortem perspective of post-nuclear holocaust,
rewriting the afterlife codes of the morbid lyric. Where can the ‘I’ live after such a
man-made apocalypse of mass death? As nuclear criticism of the 1980s attempted
to argue, such a point of view is an impossible subject position, beyond archive,
beyond readership, post-culture, post-human, without the ‘world’ of subjectivity.^58
An Essex girl who emigrated to the States to become an American poet, Levertov
writes with the directness and anger of a writer who has been absorbed by the US
West, yet preserves the distance, both critical and gendered, which helps generate a
poetics of dissent which can speak out loud without fear, angry at the ways in which
the Cold War—and its hot version in Vietnam—have infiltrated the imagination
and made it theirs:
The same war
continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the gray filth of it.^59(^56) Seehttp://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/poetry/poetrynuclear4.htmlItis accompanied on the
website in the section on nuclear war by Alison Fell’s ‘August 6, 1945’, which imagines a post-nuclear
victim of radiation blast, like a napalmed girl onthe road: ‘she will walk the dust, a scarlet girl|with
her whole stripped skin|at her heel, stuck like an old|shoe sole or mermaid’s tail.’ See Fell’s collection
Kisses for Mayakovsky(London: Virago, 1984) and her poems ‘Women of the Cold War’ and ‘The
Hallowe’en Witch (for the wire-cutters of Greenham Common)’.
(^57) For history, background and reviews of key ‘nuclear’ texts, seeNuclear Texts and Contexts,all
issues 1988–92 online athttp://www.wsu.edu/∼brians/ntc/
(^58) For nuclear criticism, see the special 1984 issue ofdiacritics(14/2); and Richard Klein, ‘The
Future of Nuclear Criticism’, 59 Yale French Studies, 77 (1990), 76–100.
Denise Levertov, ‘Life at War’, inThe Sorrow Dance(London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 79.