Chris Semansky's most recent collection of poems, Blindsided, published by 26 Books of Portland, Oregon, has been nominated for an Oregon Book Award. In the following essay Semansky examines William Stafford's "At the Bomb Testing Site " as a political poem.

At a time when literally thousands of love poems are written every day, and the poem of personal loss is the dominant flavor of lyric, William Stafford's poem, "At the Bomb Testing Site," asks us to reconsider the relationship of the personal to the political and to enlarge our sense of the public serf to include the interests of creatures as well as human beings, to consider the consequences of universal loss, not just personal. However, he does not do this by clobbering us over the head with his ideology or by belaboring the obvious or ranting about the cause du jour; he does it indirectly and quietly...