Hanford, Gainesville, Rome: The Landscapes of Debora Greger

Debora Greger’s poems are allusive and indirect, hermetic and sometimes almost surreal, minimalist, and elegantly composed. To bring them down to earth, to give them increased meaning and depth, she often embeds them in landscapes, which function as repositories and as frames. Some landscapes are deserts; others are gardens, domestic or Edenic. The poems, in which life turns out to be both dusty and luxuriant, have a special power. In those poems the vocabularies of curator, biologist, traveler, nun, engineer, child, and historian combine; and a complex vision of mortal vitality takes shape.

Debora Greger grew up in the town of Richland, near Hanford, Washington, on the Columbia River. The Hanford site was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, and is where the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world (called the B Reactor) was built; plutonium produced there was used in the bomb detonated over Nagasaki. Later the site expanded to include no less than nine nuclear reactors and five plutonium processing plants that released significant amounts of radioactive material into the air and the river, threatening the health of the people who lived nearby, as well as the local flora and fauna. Greger’s father worked there throughout her childhood, a period she evokes in Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters (1996) and elsewhere. Decades of weapons production (the United States has 60,000 nuclear weapons in its arsenal) generated a million cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste and solid radioactive waste, as well as 300 square miles of contaminated groundwater beneath the site. Indeed during the past year federal officials announced a proposal to ship some three million gallons of radioactive waste from leaking tanks at the Hanford site for disposal at Carlsbad, New Mexico, where radioactive materials are buried in rooms excavated nearly a half-mile underground in vast salt beds.

Speaking as a citizen as well as a poet, I should observe that I had never heard of the Hanford site until I began to read Debora Greger’s poems. It is odd, and significant, that these delicate, sidelong, glancing poems should remind us of one of our country’s gravest environmental debacles and of our responsibility, as citizens, not to forget. The cleanup of the Hanford site might be invisible to most of us, but it is one of our primary obligations to ourselves and the rest of the world, here at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Her poems are not ethereal and flighty, though they might seem to be at first glance; they are well grounded, since Debora Greger means business. The business, of course, is poetic; but poetry and politics arise from the same source. As Delmore Schwartz once wrote, “in dreams begin responsibilities.”

Desert

No landscape ever replaces or outflanks the landscape of childhood. Gaston Bachelard makes a long comparable argument concerning the house of childhood in The Poetics of Space. In “The Landscape of Memory,” a preface to Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters, Greger writes:

This is the landscape by which all others are found wanting. The bare hills—such extravagance of browns and grays. The silvery browns. The brassy, coppery, golden grays. The Bois de Boulogne, the hills of Umbria, even Seattle just over the mountains—too green, too many trees. The canyons of Manhattan—so much to see, you couldn’t see anything. Richland had more than enough sky. Wind was the landscape. It had swept out the past; the present was dust. I can almost taste it. The rain smelled sweetly of it. Even the snow was dusty. Even the dust, though we didn’t know it then, was radioactive.

Many writers whose upbringing was uncertain write about the contradictions at the heart of the house of childhood: the secrets, the hidden conflicts, the inevitable dissolution. But often they escape the problematic house into a larger and happier garden or countryside: think of the three Brontë sisters—or of Colette and Simone de Beauvoir. Not many found themselves exposed to a landscape that was itself poisoned, and that threatened to poison them. The irony...