She'd worked in various countries like Myanmar, India and Sri Lanka where she had seen and dealt with the tragic consequences of natural calamities and conflicts.
Mum, deadlines, undertakers: these are poor choices of words for a mother fearing calamity, though the tragic insinuations enter the poems comically.
Because Andrei Tarkovsky's critically-acclaimed 1979 film Stalker (loosely based on the Russian sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic) eerily foreshadowed the tragic Chernobyl nuclear disaster preceding the calamity by about seven years much is to be said about film's cultural relevance.
The creators of "On the Levee" certainly had honorable intentions in seeking to explore a tragic historical antecedent of that more recent calamity, but the resulting play is more reductive than illuminating, history drawn in crude, dramatic strokes that do not so much amplify as obscure it.
It is said that the word "tragic" is overused, but surely we can drag the adjective out for calamities on such a scale.
The following year, in his Lectures on the English Poets, referring to tragic poetry especially, he would observe how "in proportion as it sharpens the edge of calamity and disappointment, it strengthens the desire of good".
(It bears stipulating that one major difference between these two industrial calamities; TMI involved no loss of life. Insufficient attention has been afforded the tragic loss of 11 hardworking men from Deepwater).
