Contemporary Poetry

environment and space 155

and spirituality, as well as death and destruction. Beginning in
South Wales, the speaker muses on redemption, which to him
comes in the form of a reactor:

Resurrection

is in the reactor.

It’s the atom that’s reborn

The soul perishes

but matter can never be destroyed. (p. 9 )

The possible resurrection offered by a nuclear reactor is not only
the provision of energy, but the deadly half-life of a decaying
isotope. The speaker admits in a spiritual frenzy: ‘we are all /
fuel rods – spent, eternal’ and ‘the half-life of angels / that the
world called waste’ (p. 10 ). Writing in the early twentieth century
Maria Rainer Rilke’s poetry was accompanied by angels, whereas
it is ‘the isotope, dreaming’ that inhabits Minhinnick’s twenty-fi rst
century. The isotope moves beyond the ‘iron womb of Sellafi eld’,
the ‘cubist monument of Trawsfynydd’ and the ‘accelerator tunnel
at Berkeley’ (p. 9 ), making three journeys. The fi rst is to an
undisclosed ‘nameless place’ where the ‘geiger talk / like a black
habanero rattling with seeds’ (p. 11 ). Yet even here the isotope is
associated with birth and creation: ‘I am the Isotope dreaming /
Where they bury me an idea starts to grow’ (p. 10 ). The second
journey is to Iraq’s Basra and the ancient city states of Nineveh
and Babylon, while the third journey visits Belarus and the legacy
of Chernobyl.
‘An Isotope, Dreaming’ enacts a present nightmare while pro-
viding a foretelling of the future. The recuperation of the isotope
to indicate a spiritual awakening thwarts our expectations of radio-
activity as the speaker pleads:

Listen to this

and imagine

inside the reactor

the soft mutation

of a soul (p. 10 )