I was delighted to learn that my collection Summer Rain is reviewed in the current (May/June) issue and reproduce here for those interested. I should say, it is a very thoughtful and considered piece on the collection by poet and children's writer Catherine Ann Cullen, whose own work is well worth seeking out.
For now, here's the review:
*
Summer
Rain. Noel Duffy, Ward Wood Publishing, 87pp
"Closely
observed trifles"
Duffy has studied
experimental physics, and one of the pleasures of his work is the way it
reflects the connections between science and poetry. This collection is a
trilogy of sequences that help the reader appreciate the life of the eminent
physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, the father of atomic theory, with stunning poems
about stars, water and snow; and of ten individuals united by the presence of
rain and human frailty. From the cover photograph of electric light on puddles
to the last poem, ‘Autumn Almanac’, with its
water
dripping
into
the empty basin –
full
by morning
this is a book of
perpetual motion, of ripples constantly extending outwards.
Duffy explains in the preface that Boltzmann’s theories show ‘how the complexity of
life (an ordered state) could arise without defying this fundamental law of
entropy as he had proposed it’. The length of this preface, two and half pages,
was my one quibble – a short paragraph about Boltzmann would have sufficed.
Boltzmann’s
struggles with depression, with other scientists and with philosophy are
foregrounded in ‘Games of Chance & Reason’, a series of eight poems, many
subdivided into sections, named for the years between 1895 and 1907. The sparse
narrative allows the drama of the story to unfold quietly. We observe
Boltzmann’s moods, from buoyant to manic to depressed, as his theories fail to
convince many of his contemporaries. In the opening poem, ‘1895’, he tells his
students that, in return for their attention, trust and affection, he
will give everything I have of
myself,
my entire way of thinking and feeling.
By ‘1905’ he is repeating
this to another group but, ten years on, we feel his sense of desperation as a
student dares to challenge his authority.
Each of the ten poems in the final sequence, ‘Summer
Rain’, is a monologue in the voice of a character on whom the rain impinges. But
from Sophie, who gets soaked as she waits for a bus, to Gerard, the blind
pianist, who reaches for the black umbrella his son tells him is ‘pink with
yellow gorillas’, to Muriel, a nun who has lost her faith but prays ‘that it
may wash away my sin, that I may believe in him again’, rain is not all that
these characters experience in common: they also share a sense of movement,
like Boltzmann’s atoms. Muriel’s anxiety for change is echoed in Sophie’s
imagining how she might dare make physical contact with a woman she loves:
‘Will people stare if I reach for her hand?’ Ailish, who has just reconciled
with her husband, feels ‘the pebble of what once was pass between us / beady and
hard and durable’. Richard, the embalmer, presides over ‘the natural order, to
pass from this state to another.’ Christine, the haematologist, declares that
‘most bloods are as they should be…’, but tries to dismiss mental images of
those close to her as she examines the slides, and ‘to be as dispassionate as
the lens’ stare’ when she sees that all is not well for a woman patient.
Gerard, who lost his sight in a rugby game, asks ‘who can ever know anything
for certain?’
For me, it is the middle section of this book that is
most satisfying. Its title, ‘Into the Recesses’, is a quote from Wordsworth’s
‘Guide to the Lakes’ (‘A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise
impenetrable’). In a review of the ‘Guide’ in 1906, Virginia Woolf praised
Wordsworth’s facility in giving us
these
closely-observed trifles which only a very penetrating
eye
after long search could have selected and described… all
through
this minute and scrupulous catalogue there runs a
purpose
which solves it into one coherent and increasingly
impressive
picture… he sees them all as living parts of a
vast
and exquisitely ordered system.
Woolf’s words could
almost have been written about Duffy’s collection, which echoes Wordsworth
especially in the middle section, with poems that reference his Lake District
haunts of Rydal, Beacon Tarn and Skiddaw. Duffy’s ‘Snow Over Grasmere’, set in
the place Wordsworth called home for fourteen years, typifies the beauty of
this sequence. Duffy describes the snowflakes
dissolving
in clusters on the water’s brim
returning
to their element in a different form,
the
singular structure of each untangling
into
the molecules of their making, melting to
a
common unity before forever fading within it.
This precise description
has Duffy the scientist looking at snowflakes through a microscope, seeing
their ‘singular structure’ and their ‘molecules’, while the ‘common unity’
echoes the snowfall as unifying force in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.
Duffy earns our trust as both scientist and poet in this
collection. His ability to blend the two makes his poems echo long after they
are read. He sees into the life of things, and allows us to look through the
microscope with him.
Catherine Ann Cullen is A&L Goodbody Writer in Residence at St Joseph's School, East Wall, Dublin, and works on the Trinity College Access Programmes. Her most recent poetry collection The Other Now was published by Dedalus Press in autumn 2016.
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