Canaday on Poetry Daily

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes Dec 11, 2007

Canaday's poem is based on a real person, so the poet offers the following information in a note:

“Robert Serber studied under Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley before joining the Manhattan Project as a theoretical physicist. In March of 1943, he delivered a series of lectures, later mimeographed and nicknamed the "Los Alamos Primer," to incoming scientists to "bring them up to speed" on the bomb project. He led a theoretical group at Los Alamos and later worked at the Air Force base on Tinian, preparing for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Immediately after the war, he visited Japan as part of a scientific team gathering data on effects of nuclear weapons.”

To read the poem, please see “Robert Serber on How to Build a Bomb.”