Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Judith Vollmer’s "Yucca Mountain Sequence: 2. Sedan Crater, 1962" is a meditation on nuclear history, environmental devastation, and human complicity. The poem situates the reader in the Nevada Test Site, where nuclear experiments have left their mark on the land and the people who pass through it. The interplay of past and present—atomic tests of the 1960s and a 2001 guided tour—creates an eerie tension between memory and forgetting, between the monumental force of destruction and the banality of everyday life.

The poem opens with a quote from Derek S. Scammell, an ex-limo driver for The Beatles and Vietnam veteran, who now works as a guide for the National Nuclear Security Administration. His statement—"I love this place, it is restful."—is disturbingly incongruous. The desolation of a nuclear test site as "restful" underscores a disturbing numbness to violence, a resignation that echoes throughout the poem.

The speaker immediately turns to sensory details—"What are you breathing: pine: / Eastern white? Sugar of the Sierra Nevada?"—as if questioning the very air. This inquiry is crucial in a place marked by nuclear contamination, where breath itself carries invisible risk. The shift from natural imagery to industrial elements—"There are buses at the gate, catch the diesel on the wind."—underscores the mechanization of destruction. The test site, despite its remoteness, is deeply connected to human systems—government, industry, military power.

Vollmer populates the poem with the workers of the test site—miners, bus drivers, government employees—men who move through this landscape as part of their daily routine. The "young man fixing his badge" and the miner "gazing at the curved places in the caliche" suggest individuals numbed by repetition. The phrase—"before gunpoint-check & piss test"—conveys the routine surveillance and control that governs their lives. Yet, within this mechanized system, the miner has a moment of quiet reflection—"he could crawl in / while the sun?s still mild." This fleeting impulse to retreat into the earth hints at a desire for escape, an almost instinctive recognition of the land’s deeper significance.

As the poem unfolds, Vollmer introduces the "silver coin of plutonium arriving tonight in a classified white-on-white truck." This is no ordinary cargo—it is the material of annihilation, transported with bureaucratic efficiency. The secrecy surrounding it—"white-on-white"—reinforces the erasure of public awareness, the way nuclear power moves unseen through society.

The invocation of nuclear test names—"Old bomb clouds / Plumb-bob & Charlie, Buster-Jangle & Plowshare"—reads like a grim litany. These names, once classified, now float as ghosts, reminders of past detonations that reshaped the landscape. The voice of the crater itself emerges—"I?m four football fields wide & twice that underground." Here, the physical scar of the Sedan Crater speaks as a vast wound, a mouth that has swallowed history and cannot be filled.

The final stanzas collapse time, merging the present with the moment of nuclear detonation. The sky—"very wide, very light here"—is simultaneously beautiful and obliterating. The wind carries not only dust but "millions of flutes-bones, feather-stems / claws, & lungs." Every living thing in the blast radius has been reduced to particulate matter, carried away as part of the landscape’s memory.

"Yucca Mountain Sequence: 2. Sedan Crater, 1962" is a powerful engagement with the long shadow of nuclear testing. Vollmer captures the stark contrast between the test site’s bureaucratic normalcy and its apocalyptic legacy. The poem moves between human-scaled experiences—miners on their daily commute, the smell of sagebrush—and the unfathomable scale of destruction—plutonium that "never dies," ghosts of bomb tests drifting in the wind. In doing so, she forces the reader to confront the paradox of nuclear history: the way it is both ever-present and invisibly buried, shaping landscapes and futures long after the detonations have ceased.

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