Christina Pacosz

Notes From the Red Zone
By Christina Pacosz
ISBN 978-0-9820372-9-4
20 page chapbook at 7.00
Seven Kitchens Press
P.O. Box 668
Lewisburg PA 17837

Notes From the Red Zone was originally published in 1983. Like any
work of excellence, the content remains pertinent and timely today.
Man is still polluting water, air and soil. Nuclear proliferation
still hangs over us all, a dark, dreadful specter. Poet David
Chorlton says in the introduction that Christina Pacosz demonstrates a
"universal compassion." That compassionate heart beats on every page
of this chapbook. As she does in all her work, Ms. Pacosz juxtaposes
stark reality with poignant sparks of beauty and hope.

In the red zone, that poisonous hot zone around the Hanford nuclear
energy plant, life struggles to maintain its equilibrium in various
ways while the poet quietly observes and records:

Yakima river at brown flood
where wild carrot shouts
under the shelter of bleached
and towered trees

Secretive birds rustle
through thick brush
and magpies declare the headlines
of a black and white world

Nuclear waste, poisons spread by crop dusters, exterminators, and farm
chemicals "accumulate like tumbleweed on barbed wire / lacing ground
water%u2026" Land, air, water, and people reap the poisonous harvest:

A twelve-year-old boy
reels with lymphoma,
bald beneath the blue mesh cap
advertising doormat spray.
His mother, the neighbors,
her coworkers
look at me
like horses trapped in a barn fire
when I ask,
how long have you lived here?

Amidst such frightening scenarios, Ms. Pacosz searches for tiny
vestiges of hope to share with readers:

A plant,
one of thousands
cultivated in the machine-sowed, tended rows
raises its chemical-prodded
green flag to the evening.

I stoop
and stroke its leaves.
Suddenly

I am
less afraid.

This is a stunning, harrowing vision from a gifted wordsmith who
grieves for everything we've lost "at the close of a millennium of
death." My review of this chapbook cannot possibly do justice to the
content. If you only hear one voice raised in defense of Earth's
environment, let it be hers.

These messages from Poland's past seem all the more frightening because, essentially, nothing has changed in our world today. Futile wars are still fought. Downtrodden people remain that way. And monuments are still erected to the dead in every country.

One of my favorite poems in this book is "Auschwitz: Oswiecim". The poet's thoughts on seeing Auschwitz were tinged with outrage and horror, but beautifully expressed through images of hope:

We are leaving
flowers like messages
in this awful place:

what else to do
except fall down
with weeping
into a grieving
that will never
be done.
**********
We should haul
larkspur by
the truckload
and fill every
exhibit room
from floor to ceiling
with levity
with light.

We must airdrop
hyacinth, purple
sorrow raining down
until this place
of the awful name
is smothered in
fragrance.

Christina Pacosz has been the recipient of a Ucross Foundation grant providing a block of time to write poetry. She also served as Visiting Artist for several seasons with the North Carolina Arts Council. Such amply bestowed honors came to Ms. Pacosz for valid reasons. Her work is beautifully crafted, easily understood, and often breathtaking.

It's left up to readers to decide what is the winded, wild beast referenced in the title. In one poem it is a train progressing cross country. In another, it could be viewed as separate forces battling within the poet. In "Got to Revolution", I envisioned America as it is today - once wild and free but now visibly winded:

Who was it turned
this fertile plain
into ravaged prairie?
Who was it turned
a wild green land
into the fume and belch
of industrial refuse,
municipal sewage
and corporate refuge?

Regardless of topic, Ms. Pacosz is capable of thrilling metaphors and descriptive passages. But it is her chilling cries against all souls lost in wars past and present that I found most stirring. Simply and eloquently, she brings lost warriors to life, as in "How the Sound of Freedom Dies":

Sweet William, it's a long hard way
out of Pine Mountain, there in the hills
a few miles from Hazard and Harlan,
where blood still runs with the coal.
When Commander William S. Hayes dies, his widow is left with nothing but a flag and her sorrow:

She was an ache
carrying a bit of colored cloth
and she staggered
with the weight.