Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters

by Debora Greger

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.”

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1996

About the author

Debora Greger (b. 1949) is an American poet and visual artist.

Greger was raised in Richland, Washington. She attended the University of Washington and then the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Greger then went on to hold fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was professor of English and creative writing at the University of Florida until retiring. Greger now works as Poet-in-Residence at the Harn Museum of Art.

Greger has published numerous books of poetry, including Men, Women, and Ghosts (2008), and her work has been included in issues of Best American Poetry . As a reviewer for Publishers Weekly observed, Greger “rarely rejoices, though she can surely console; her pruned-back, autumnal sensibility and her balanced lines suit the scenes she portrays.” Her poetry has been included in six volumes of The Best American Poetry and she has exhibited her artwork at several galleries and museums across the country. She also has a poem on Poetry 180 in number 42. Her work appeared in Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The New Criterion.

Debora Greger lives in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge, England with her life-partner, the poet and critic, William Logan.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is broken up into three sections. The first section seems to focus on growing up Catholic and her father's work at the uranium/plutonium refinement plants in the Washington desert. I found this section absolutely fascinating and flew right threw it. The other two sections seem a little less defined, or maybe I'm just less familiar. The following sections focus on being a traveler in Rome and Venice.
Her poems seem quiet and charged with an underlying energy, something like a pulse or flow that goes unnoticed for its constant nature.

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greger seems to work with extremes in constructing the sections for her books. First Washington, then Imperial Rome. Is this effective? It could be. There are some nicely spliced moments in the last section. But, as with other Greger books, the moments are spoiled by the predictability of them. The connections at the end feel too much like obligation than coincidence.

[Sherry (sethurner) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greger grew up in Washington near Hanford, a fact that informs the first few poems in this collection. I was interested because my grandmother lived there on a wheat ranch for a few years in her childhood. Greger's writing evokes the same place in the age of nuclear anxiety. Later poems explore the beauty of nature and feelings of mortality in a watery place, Venice. Interesting.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deborah Gregor has written a unique poetry book which speaks of her childhood, growing up in the desert, near the site of the atomic plant, which manufactured plutonium which was used in the bombing of Nagasaki.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this stunning collection of poems in form about surviving childhood radiation exposure. Excellent work on a difficult subject.

[Earth&Silver · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked a good deal of this -- especially the way she dances back and forth between religious imagery and harsh realities in some of her poems, and the descriptions of light/water in the Venice bits -- but I honestly often found it hard to follow as well. Sometimes she moves too fast for me between unfamiliar references and metaphors! No shade on her as a poet, I think I just lack the life experience for some of it to work for me.

[CJ]

This book of poetry details Greger's childhood in the shadow of the Hanford atomic plant, where her father worked. Greger's poems about the fallout of the plant both at home and abroad are very vivid, but she lost me in the middle with a long section on another subject. Pairs well with "Full Body Burden," Kristin Iversen's memoir about growing up downwind of Rocky Flats.

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd give this six stars if I could.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dust to dust, isotopes to isotopes...