Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters (Poets, Penguin) [Paperback]

Debora Greger (Author)

Book Description

Series: Poets, Penguin | Publication Date: November 1, 1996

Award-winning poet Debora Greger grew up in Washington near the site of the Hanford atomic plant, which, unbeknownst to its workers, manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. “The high school team was named the Bombers,” she writes. “The school ring had a mushroom cloud on it.” In Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters she uses what The Nation has characterized as her “deadpan wit, intelligence and marvelous insight” to explore the legacy of a Catholic girlhood spent in a landscape where “even the dust, though we didn’t know it then, was radioactive.”“Call us out of the animal,” Greger writes, invoking the ghost of a poet conjured in “Nights of 1995,” in what could be construed as the motto of a collection filled with what Poetry called “priceless instants where the mundane flares up into the miraculous.”

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Debora Greger grew up not far from the Hanford atomic plant in eastern Washington, where her father worked. In this arid landscape, she writes, "even the dust, though we didn't know it then, was radioactive." Much of this collection, her fifth, revolves around that landscape and its impact on her childhood. As always, Greger's verse is polished, playful, and highly allusive. And in "Nights of 1995," she pays tribute to the late James Merrill in a manner that does that verbal magician proud: "Profligate with loss, / the live oak wept the old leaves down; / one pine needle stitched the air / a shroud to enfold one last song."

From Publishers Weekly

In her fifth collection of verse, Greger (Movable Islands) brings clarity and a deft allusive touch to themes of innocence and faith, love and death. These poems are animated by the spirit of Washington State's Hanford nuclear plant, where the plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was manufactured. Greger grew up near Hanford, a town ignorant of the nearby toxic danger even while its fathers went to work at the plant. Greger displays a bracing combination of nostalgia and deadpan wit in her evocation of a childhood filled with Catholic school ideals and Cold War fears. "Someone's father left Mass early/ for the first shift at the reactor./ Who needed intercession by the mother of God?/ The angel Plutonium would keep us safe." Greger's imagery runs often to light, dust and weeds in the company of Catholic motifs such as angels and saints, repeated in formal measures of iambic pentameter and the occasional sonnet. The glow of youth and innocence against a backdrop of mortality-"the world trimmed in white/ on its way to death"-hovers delicately over these poems.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (November 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140587748
• ISBN-13: 978-0140587746
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,578,054 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding., May 14, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

We have long come to expect polish from Debora Greger, but we find much more than that with this collection. Here we not only have the wit and intelligence we expect from Ms. Greger, but a sense of urgency, the personal. These poems deal with the testing of the materials used to make the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, foreign travel which becomes a self-exile, and the need to reconcile the disparities found at every turn throughout the book. A masterful collection that gives us the poet at her best. A stunning book.// C. Dale Young, Associate Editor of NEW ENGLAND REVIEW