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Poetry review – STILL LIFE WITH APOCALYPSE: Charles Rammelkamp is grimly fascinated by Alan Catlin’s poetic reporting of multiple disasters
Still Life with Apocalypse Alan Caitlin
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026
$17.00, 112 pages
ISBN: 978-1-962405-69-0
In “The View from Nose Mountain Firehouse 9-11,” a poem in which the World Trade Center disaster is being broadcast on a black and white television screen while a flowerpot rests on the console top, Alan Catlin describes ‘this
strangely arranged tableau of epic human disaster happening now with inert mundane objects, to be re-titled: Still Life With Apocalypse
It’s the source of the collection’s title, of course, but like all good titles it suggests the overall theme and focus of the book, stark images, tableaux, of one horrific event after the other, from the development of the atomic bomb to the recent ICE murders in Minneapolis.
Divided into three sections – “Soldiers,” which mainly deals with Vietnam, “The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” covering the development of the atomic bomb, and “War All the Time,” which includes poems about the you-name-it catastrophes that have proliferated over the past twenty-five years since the 9/11 terrorist attack, from Iraq to Chernobyl to the Boston Marathon bombing – the apocalyptic scenarios are unrelenting. The final section begins with the ironic “Edward Moran’s Henry Hudson’s Entering NY Harbor Sept 11, 1609,” in which a lone Native American watches sailors coming ashore:
the first foreign terrorists have arrived.
Three hundred and ninety-two years ahead of Mohamed Atta, eh?
Yet the horror of September 11, 2001, cannot be overstated. Missing persons posters and flyers wallpapered the city, especially in lower Manhattan. In “Missing Peace: a Flyer on Canal Street,” a bum is taking slugs from a pint of whiskey, a neighborhood regular. He shakes his fist in the general direction of the disaster site and curses the Wall Street bankers and stock brokers whose livelihoods have been disrupted, almost a precursor of the Occupy movement.
He doesn’t bother with his usual exclamation “The End Is Near!” The end was yesterday.
But before 9/11 there was Vietnam, and before Vietnam there was World War II and the dawn of the atomic age. In the “Soldiers” section, Catlin turns his attention to the individuals who made up the Age of Aquarius, from the naive, gung-ho soldier boys (‘The ones that came back all said / the same thing. “It wasn’t like / I thought it was going to be…”’) to the drug-addled hippies, the kid in “Young Man in Front of a Poster of Timothy Leary, 1967,” a ‘this could-be-anyone-young-man.’ At the end of the poem, Catlin wonders,
Who will he be in ten years? Twenty? An equity fund manager? A stockbroker?
Sounds like Jerry Rubin, author of DO IT! Scenarios of the Revolution, and, six years later, Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven.
In any case, nobody was spared, not the character in “Peace” who ‘was a / one man day of rage,’ burning draft cards and freaking on ‘bad acid as Jimi played the Star / Spangled Banner that defined a / generation on drugs,’ who will go on to a life as a fugitive, one step ahead of the retributive law; and not the former soldier in “Dreaming of Green” who is so traumatized by his experiences in the jungle, reliving them over and over again as he sits in the bar trying to forget.
Give me a good old fire fight anytime. Some balls to the wall hand to hand combat to keep you focused.
While killing and torture have been an essential part of “civilization” virtually since the dawn of time, the atomic age seemingly upped the ante. ‘Genocide as the ruling principle of the second half of the / twentieth century,’ Catlin writes in “The Future, Baby, It Is Murder” from the “Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer” section, which details the horrific consequences of the experimentation that went on in the western United States. He details all this in “Firsthand Viewing the Ground Zero Nevada Desert,” “Blowback/Downwinders,” “The Day We Bombed Utah” and other poems in the Oppenheimer section. “The Conqueror (1956)” is a poem about a movie about Genghis Khan starring John Wayne and Susan Hayward, universally panned as one of the worst films ever made. Yet an alarming number of people involved in the production of the movie, shot in the Utah desert, developed cancer, forty-six dying from it. Carcinogenic fallout from the testing had deadly effects as far away as upstate New York.
Have we become increasingly jaded to the cruelty and brutality? Catlin seems to suggest as much in the penultimate poem, “In the Age of Nixon.” When four unarmed students were murdered by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970, massive protests followed, the outrage universal. But now?
Under Trump shooting a mother of three with stuffed toys in her glove compartment and a mutt in the backseat of her SUV was okay
They called her a domestic terrorist as if those stuffed toys were IED’s
And then a gang of six ICE agents beat down an ICU nurse and shot him dead in the street
And that’s okay too
All of these horrors mentioned here are just a sample of the jaw-dropping incidents Alan Catlin lays out in grim detail. As one back-cover blurb asserts, ‘Nobody does Armageddon like Alan Catlin.’
Sep 29 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Alan Caitlin
Poetry review – STILL LIFE WITH APOCALYPSE: Charles Rammelkamp is grimly fascinated by Alan Catlin’s poetic reporting of multiple disasters
Still Life with Apocalypse
Alan Caitlin
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026
$17.00, 112 pages
ISBN: 978-1-962405-69-0
In “The View from Nose Mountain Firehouse 9-11,” a poem in which the World Trade Center disaster is being broadcast on a black and white television screen while a flowerpot rests on the console top, Alan Catlin describes ‘this
strangely arranged tableau
of epic human disaster
happening now with
inert mundane objects,
to be re-titled:
Still Life With Apocalypse
It’s the source of the collection’s title, of course, but like all good titles it suggests the overall theme and focus of the book, stark images, tableaux, of one horrific event after the other, from the development of the atomic bomb to the recent ICE murders in Minneapolis.
Divided into three sections – “Soldiers,” which mainly deals with Vietnam, “The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” covering the development of the atomic bomb, and “War All the Time,” which includes poems about the you-name-it catastrophes that have proliferated over the past twenty-five years since the 9/11 terrorist attack, from Iraq to Chernobyl to the Boston Marathon bombing – the apocalyptic scenarios are unrelenting. The final section begins with the ironic “Edward Moran’s Henry Hudson’s Entering NY Harbor Sept 11, 1609,” in which a lone Native American watches sailors coming ashore:
the first
foreign terrorists
have arrived.
Three hundred and ninety-two years ahead of Mohamed Atta, eh?
Yet the horror of September 11, 2001, cannot be overstated. Missing persons posters and flyers wallpapered the city, especially in lower Manhattan. In “Missing Peace: a Flyer on Canal Street,” a bum is taking slugs from a pint of whiskey, a neighborhood regular. He shakes his fist in the general direction of the disaster site and curses the Wall Street bankers and stock brokers whose livelihoods have been disrupted, almost a precursor of the Occupy movement.
He doesn’t bother
with his usual exclamation “The End Is Near!”
The end was yesterday.
But before 9/11 there was Vietnam, and before Vietnam there was World War II and the dawn of the atomic age. In the “Soldiers” section, Catlin turns his attention to the individuals who made up the Age of Aquarius, from the naive, gung-ho soldier boys (‘The ones that came back all said / the same thing. “It wasn’t like / I thought it was going to be…”’) to the drug-addled hippies, the kid in “Young Man in Front of a Poster of Timothy Leary, 1967,” a ‘this could-be-anyone-young-man.’ At the end of the poem, Catlin wonders,
Who will he be in ten years? Twenty?
An equity fund manager? A stockbroker?
Sounds like Jerry Rubin, author of DO IT! Scenarios of the Revolution, and, six years later, Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven.
In any case, nobody was spared, not the character in “Peace” who ‘was a / one man day of rage,’ burning draft cards and freaking on ‘bad acid as Jimi played the Star / Spangled Banner that defined a / generation on drugs,’ who will go on to a life as a fugitive, one step ahead of the retributive law; and not the former soldier in “Dreaming of Green” who is so traumatized by his experiences in the jungle, reliving them over and over again as he sits in the bar trying to forget.
Give me a good old fire
fight anytime. Some balls
to the wall hand to hand
combat to keep you focused.
While killing and torture have been an essential part of “civilization” virtually since the dawn of time, the atomic age seemingly upped the ante. ‘Genocide as the ruling principle of the second half of the / twentieth century,’ Catlin writes in “The Future, Baby, It Is Murder” from the “Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer” section, which details the horrific consequences of the experimentation that went on in the western United States. He details all this in “Firsthand Viewing the Ground Zero Nevada Desert,” “Blowback/Downwinders,” “The Day We Bombed Utah” and other poems in the Oppenheimer section. “The Conqueror (1956)” is a poem about a movie about Genghis Khan starring John Wayne and Susan Hayward, universally panned as one of the worst films ever made. Yet an alarming number of people involved in the production of the movie, shot in the Utah desert, developed cancer, forty-six dying from it. Carcinogenic fallout from the testing had deadly effects as far away as upstate New York.
Have we become increasingly jaded to the cruelty and brutality? Catlin seems to suggest as much in the penultimate poem, “In the Age of Nixon.” When four unarmed students were murdered by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970, massive protests followed, the outrage universal. But now?
Under Trump
shooting a mother of three
with stuffed toys in her glove compartment
and a mutt in the backseat of her SUV
was okay
They called her a domestic terrorist
as if those stuffed toys were IED’s
And then a gang of six ICE agents
beat down an ICU nurse and shot him
dead in the street
And that’s okay too
All of these horrors mentioned here are just a sample of the jaw-dropping incidents Alan Catlin lays out in grim detail. As one back-cover blurb asserts, ‘Nobody does Armageddon like Alan Catlin.’
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