Introduction & Overview of At the Bomb Testing Site by William Stafford

At the Bomb Testing Site Introduction

"At the Bomb Testing Site" is an unusual work: it is an antiwar poem that never directly mentions war. In a review in Field, Charles Simic called the poem "A political poem in which not a single political statement is made."

The poem appeared in West of Your City, William Stafford's first collection of poetry, which was published by a small press in 1960. One of Stafford's best known and most widely anthologized poems, "At the Bomb Testing Site" deals with the conflict between the natural environment and the artificial world that man has imposed upon it.

The title refers to the atomic bomb testing in the New Mexico and Nevada deserts that began in 1945. Although the poem implicitly refers to the horrors of war and the ravages of radiation fallout, it is anything but a "no-nukes" polemic. Instead, it focuses on the behavior of a lizard...
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