'Summer Rain' Review - Books Ireland

Books Ireland has been a mainstay of the Irish publishing scene for many years. It is a subscription based magazine (print and digital) and is always worth the price of admission. I encourage you, therefore, to support this enterprise if you have the means to do so. You can find out all about it at: Books Ireland Magazine

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.

Review of 'Summer Rain' - Dublin Review of Books

I will publish posts in the coming weeks about poetry in general (I'm very keen to share a wonderful video interpretation of a W.S Merwin poem) but for now, I thought to focus on my own recent collection and reproduce this very substantial review of Summer Rain by poet Enda Wyley in The Dublin Review of Books. 

Before that though, I will add that the DRB is a wonderful resource regarding Irish literature and culture, in all forms, and you can visit their homepage and read many excellent articles at: http://www.drb.ie/home

So, here's the review.


*


'The Kingdom of Water' 

Noel Duffy’s third collection, Summer Rain, is structured into three different parts – each exhibiting a poetic range, an experimentation in form and theme which mark a departure from the more lyrical, autobiographical work of his previous volumes, In the Library of Lost Objects (2011) and On Light and Carbon (2013).

These are new sequences from a poet eager to take chances in subject matter and to push forward the boundaries of his craft. At the same time these poems protect what has been a striking feature of Duffy’s work to date – a fascination with the sciences, stemming from his studies in experimental physics at Trinity College, Dublin.

In the light of this interest, it seems entirely fitting that Summer Rain begins with a section “Games of Chance & Reason”. Here, eight poems, dated 1895–1907, follow the final years of the brilliant Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. This is an unusual choice of subject for poetry – one better suited to a physics lecture or a scientific journal, you might think. And yet it is a measure of Duffy’s development as a poet that he has created a convincing verse drama infused with a dialogue that would work as well on radio as it does on the page.

In a compact preface, he explains the importance of Boltzmann’s theories. “Using a deceptively simple starting point, he posited that atoms existed and if we measure their behavior in vast numbers using statistical methods, all the laws of classical thermodynamics could be fully understood.” Boltzmann also believed that pockets of order existed within disorder. Duffy explains how this “gave a working foundation for how the complexity of life itself (an ordered state) could arise without defying the fundamental law of entropy as he had proposed it”.

These are challenging ideas and ones which today have defined Boltzmann as one of the most gifted physicists of the nineteenth century. But in his own lifetime he encountered much opposition to his ideas, most especially from the positivists – scientists who only believed what evidence could actually prove. Chief amongst these was the forceful proponent of positivist philosophy Ernst Mach.

It is out of the conflict between Boltzmann and Mach that Duffy develops an intriguing poetic argument. Ideas and counter-ideas battle for the truth.

Ludwig stands in the small wood-panelled
lecture room, a dozen or so students facing him
in rows. ‘I ask you to place your faith in me,
for there are those who say I am a charlatan
or a fool. And some who say I am both!

Of course, he was neither a charlatan nor a fool. And ultimately, it is his genius that Duffy celebrates, in poems which expose the thrill of Boltzmann’s discoveries, the excitement of his ideas – as well as the disillusionment and ultimate tragedy of his story.

Now all seems lost; lost to him in dispute
and the over-labour of duties. He knows
this cannot go on, that he falters more
with every step he tries to take, each ending,
it seems, in failure and regret.’

“Into the Recesses”, the second section of Summer Rain, moves us into a new imaginative zone, with an epigraph from Wordsworth as our guide. “A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.”

Sixteen observational nature poems follow, using twenty-first century knowledge as a means to reimagine pantheism. The poems succeed because of their powerful attention to detail and their allegiance to Duffy’s interest in physics.

In “Surface Tension” carefully chosen words like “membrane” and “meniscus” are subtly scientific, helping this small poem to lodge itself memorably in the reader’s imagination.

Water too has a skin,
that membrane that separates
its world from our own, the meniscus
that trembles in the light
late evening breeze, not breaking it
but forming small rivulets
upon its surface, a flickering
of light playing on the eye
separating our world from theirs;
the kingdom of water;
the kingdom of air.

Water flows purposefully throughout the poems in this section. In “Storm over Skiddaw” sheep huddle together while “rain falls down / heavily about them”. A waterfall is wonderfully described as a “cascade of quicksilver/ force”, finally slowing down to a “cantering measure” in the poem “Tyneware Waterfall”, while in “Molecules in Motion”, waters are “flowing downriver towards the lake / and the human scale of the waiting landscape”. These are poems which skilfully celebrate the cycle of water in a diversity of natural settings. They are carefully honed, complement each other and make for an arresting second part of an intriguing collection.

Duffy concludes his third collection with a series of ten intimate monologues, set in contemporary Dublin – although the city is secondary to the voices of each speaker, all specifically named and all very different in their concerns and experiences. Broken marriages, drugs, emotional problems, disappointments are the fabric of these poems as we are introduced to the troubled and disaffected of the poet’s making. And yet there is an overriding humanity flowing like the rain through the days of each speaker, which offers some consolation for the future.

Muriel, though devastated by her loss of faith, tightens her coat about her, walks out onto the streets, hoping the rain will wash away her sin “that I may believe in Him again / Jesus who no longer lives with me / Pray for me …”. Richard’s job is to clean dead bodies and yet he ponders how “there is a tenderness, in the end, in this work I do”. “Caroline”, the final poem of the collection, encapsulates the humane, enquiring voice which flows as consistently as water throughout the three sequences of Summer Rain – a collection, which for all its exactness of structure, should ultimately be enjoyed for its great empathy and craft.

I pick another canvas
from the pile stacked along
the studio wall, blank and waiting
for a truer mood. I will paint
the smell of rain instead and start
with earthen brown and red.

1/1/2017

Enda Wyley is a poet and children’s author. She has published five collections of poetry with Dedalus Press – most recently Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems (2014). She was the recipient of The Vincent Buckley Prize for Poetry and the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for Poetry (2014). She is a member of Aosdána.

Wild Cherries - poem

I never knew my maternal grandfather. When I try think of him the image that comes to mind is that of his namesake, my Uncle Dinny. I was so delighted my uncle made it to my launch in September but saddened to say now that he died a few weeks ago. So, I'm not sure if this poem is about him (indirectly as a guiding character) or my granddad himself, though they were, in the end, quite different men - though great musicians both. I can see no immediate place for this poem in terms of work I am currently writing. I decided, in any case, to add here to have it available somewhere as a standalone piece, though it throws up a somewhat complex range of emotions. In any case, here it is. 


*

Wild Cherries 

In Memory of Denis O’Brien

i. Prelude

You were a man I never knew

and never will – one whose life

mine depends upon, yet you are ghost

to me, grandfather, dying far away

across the sea before I was born,

fading like all others to an imagined past

that I will never understand or fully grasp.

ii. 'The Rath'

O’Brien’s Bridge and the stony fields,

the lands your father and his brothers ploughed,

their lasting mark upon the landscape

of their birth to leave their old life behind

with the promise of a better future

in this newly-minted Nation: a good holding

far from the wild Atlantic shore

and the winding roads of County Clare,                   

a farm in north county Dublin, Kilsallaghan,

as much country back then as the lands

your father had come from, its soil

dark and rich and good, but too little of it,

in the end, for all his sons to prosper by.

Young you left and went to the city.

iii. Uniform

My mam said you looked as smart                

as a policeman in your dark navy uniform,

the JJ&S insignia on your cap marking you

employee of John Jameson & Sons,

Whiskey Makers since 1781, a good job

by any measure as you led your dray horses

down along the banks of the Liffey and on

to the docklands where the barges waited

with their cargo of amber, ready to move

this seemingly inexhaustible bounty

to the four corners of town and country.

iv. Music

I will never know your gait or manner

or how you held yourself as you walked

into a room or pub, though I heard once

that you could set the place alight with talk

or your playing on the fiddle, a Woodbine

browning your fingers at the tips as it burnt

down to a butt, a pint of Guinness and a Jemmie

on the table before you as you played reels

and jigs at the barroom or kitchen session,

these places where happiness found you, music

your one true gift to those you tried to love

though sometimes failed, you sliding then into the well

of drink and the sinking regret that fell over you,

stumbling home late below the Harvest Moon

rising above the rooftops of these regimented streets,

no crops to be gathered in this over-filled place,

just to walk and walk and never reach home,

the darkness and the dark thoughts descending again

as if the very stars had died and dimmed to silence.

v. Exile 

You were not one spoken of often
as though something unspeakable had happened
to cast you in shadow; perhaps that day you laid
an envelope of money on the kitchen table
and told my grandmother that she’d never see
or hear from you again – the poor woman,
her nerves already gone – then hugging my mother
in the scrap-filled yard, telling her
what an elegant young woman she was
and why couldn’t her younger sister be like her,
ladylike and well-mannered in all her ways
instead of a tom-boy staying out late
and chasing boys twice her age.
                                                     Gone,
half the children were sent to relatives in the Rath,
my mother, the eldest, left to raise the rest,
stealing from her the hope to go on in school,
though she never said a bad word against you.
It was just how life was, she said, in the tough
trenches of the 1950s, getting by day to day,
depending on the kindness of neighbour
while working long hours in a sewing factory,
half her siblings more like cousins in the end,
big-boned men like him and country in their ways.
 
And so, grandfather, you chose your exile
the day you left that envelope on the table
leaving for Manchester on the morning ferry
to work the building sites and never come back,

taking digs in Levenshulme, your fiddle sold,

and dying there at sixty in the deep of sleep,
though three of your sons by your side by then
at least, returning you safely home by night 

so that you could be laid to rest, finally, in Irish soil 

- the year Kennedy died.

vii. Memory

I try to fill the gap with fragments, anecdotes

and clues, though no concluding image comes

to mind to complete my rag-tag picture of you.

How we each pass with our dying breath into

the foreverness of forgetfulness – like the land

you once walked with your brothers so many years before,

the hope you felt out there in the wide open fields

fading now to a monochrome photograph

of another time, a different place; and the stories

that may yet still await to add again your human face

to those gathered around the family fireplace:

this partial and imagined portrait I try make for you

– grandfather I never knew.

'Summer Rain' - Launch Photos

Well, I had a great launch for my collection Summer Rain at Books Upstairs in Dublin at the end of September. Here is some photographic evidence!

Old friends gather, including Sarah Douglas and Greg O'Brien

Poet and novelist David Butler sets the formal proceedings going by welcoming the audience and introducing the wonderful poet Peter Sirr to say some words about the collection. 

Peter spoke to the gathered audience with his extremely lucid (as ever), close reading of the work. It was a true honour to have him there on the evening.

Peter's summary of the collection as 'a book in three movements, symphonic in its breadth' was extremely humbling to hear... 

Finally, I face my nerves - and the audience - to say some words of thanks to the many who have helped me along the way with this one.

Physics corner: Poets Iggy McGovern, Kate Dempsey and Ross Hattaway read as I read - from my own collection, mind. Otherwise, that would be just rude...

I finish my short(ish) reading from the book with the monologue 'Ailish', one of my favourite pieces from the collection. 

The Host with the most, D Butler, returns to the floor and wraps up the speechifying, inducing folk to have (another) glass of wine and buy the wares on offer!

Old pals, Brian Walsh and Greg O'Brien chatting afterwards...

...while, thankfully, I had some books to sign.

My great friend from New York, Beth Phillips, chats with my mam.

The rest of the family had come in numbers also. My uncle Dinser and aunt Margaret, with my brother Paddy and his partner Valerie.

Still signing books, thankfully, when ambushed with a man-hug by my old pal and neighbour, Mick Cregan. 

My uncle Frank, original toubadour of the family, talking to my brother Aidan.

To finish, a shot of me - book in hands - ruminating afterwards... Naturally, we all then headed to the nearest tavern...

My profound thanks to all who came along to make the launch such a special occasion. Massive thanks also to Books Upstairs for hosting the event and their long and enduring support of contemporary Irish writing and my publisher Ward Wood for their continued support in publishing my work. And finally, special mention for my good friend Steve Wilson who took the wonderfully atmospheric photographs on the night.


Till the next one!

'Rock Ammonite' at the 'Poetry & Science Hub'

This poem and commentary first appeared on the University of Liverpool's 'Centre for Poetry & Science' website, edited by poet Deryn Rees-Jones. More content on this very fascinating marriage of ideas can be found at the Poetry & Science Hub.

Rock Ammonite

The surprising simplicity of it
there among the shoal:
little earth-memory,
spiralling palimpsest.

It is the alpha and omega
of necessity, the first word
and the last of all
argument. And if the eye

is steady retrace the slow-
turning of centuries
and descend step-wise,
down the tight curve

of its spine to the centre
about which all appears
to turn. And there,
to close your eyes

and push one step further,
past language and origins
into the dark beginnings
of it all.

from In the Library of Lost Objects (Ward Wood Publishing, London, 2011) 

---

As the French theorist Gaston Bachelard points out in The Poetics of Space, stones represent a special place in our imagination. They are symbols of permanence, at least to everyone except a geologist, who would view them undoubtedly as dynamic. It is no surprise that the grand monuments of any great society – from the Neolithic ‘time chamber’ at Newgrange to the Arc de Triomphe – are made of stone. They are there to endure, to suggest power over time; to defy time for as long as possible.

We often think of ourselves as being in possession of a Self, as Jung would put it, or an Ego and Id as Freud claimed. In a way though, we have many selves. There is the weight of personal memory and the biographical self; there is the social self, which is probably the one that doesn’t make it into poems; there is also the set of ideas we have encountered and assimilated giving us, what we might call, a philosophical self. In my collection In the Library of Lost Objects I have tried to explore these different ‘selves’ in a way that they become interconnected and necessary to each other, the small or large personal dramas played out against the backdrop of an impersonal canvas: deep time as well as lived time.

If stones signify permanence, fossils represent a special case. They are life preserved in rock. As such they are a kind of double-image of the notion of permanence, giving us both a glimpse of what they were as living things, and their concrete existence in the present as “little earth-memories”. Their lives are short-lived, but through the process of petrifaction, they possess an after-life, surviving across vast tracts of time to present themselves to us behind glass in display cases.

This poem is based around a simple conceit: that the spiral form of the ammonite represents both its own cause and the spiral of evolution itself. We push back in time and “descend step-wise / down the tight curve / of its spine”. This brings us to the origins of life itself and beyond to the point of unknowing before “the dark beginnings of it all.”

In an earlier draft, that phrase “of it all” read “of the world”. The word world is one of most powerful in the language, yet here it seemed too abstract and general. The more casual “of it all” seemed to suggest something broader and bigger, yet more mysterious: life itself.

*

When CP Snow delivered his famous lecture in 1959 on the “two cultures” – the sciences and the humanities – they seemed to him at that time to be growing ever further apart. It is an observation that is probably even more true now. I think to resolve this we need to understand that the sciences and the arts can live side by side and both serve a function, though it would be simplistic to say it is the same function. Science gives us objective knowledge whereas a poem can never be verifiable in the same way as a scientific argument is. It is not a theorem and its proof.

Yet, at the same time, I believe the best poems endure because they represents a different type of truth, though one that is more persuasive than empirical. It gives us a sense of the subjective and emotional nature of our daily existence. In other words, where science excels at giving us definitive, objective knowledge, poetry and the arts are the instruments of expressing the experiential nature of our lives – even when encountering something as seemingly abstract as a fossil, as I try to show in this poem.  I very much hope that poetry can engage with and be informed by the rich insights, vocabularies, and discoveries of science. As someone with a background in natural sciences, I draw on these subjects not just for effect but because they feel integral to the way in which I respond to, and write about, both the personal and philosophical aspects of life. In the end, all these things can connect and inform each other. That is my hope, at least.

The Line of the Known & Unknown - essay

Essay commissioned for the exhibition ‘The Infinite Line [The Search for the Unknown]', 
Tactic Gallery, Cork City: 9^th-22^nd May, 2014. 

                                                              *

In 1819, John Keats wrote these famous lines in his long narrative poem, ‘Lamia’:

                        Conquer all mystery by rule and line,

                        Empty the haunted air and gnomèd mine –

                        Unweave the rainbow, as it erstwhile made

                        The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

Keats was, of course, referring in those last lines to that towering figure of science Isaac Newton and how, for him, the rainbow demonstrated the reflection and refraction of light through moisture in the atmosphere to reveal the full glory of the visible spectrum. For Keats, such a description of this natural phenomenon robbed it of its former mystery, reducing it to mere explanation. It should be said, of course, that Romanticism was, in many ways, a retreat from 18^th century rationalism and the rise in elevation of the importance of science during that era. Romantics such as Keats built their founding philosophy on the notion that it was more important to write of the feeling generated by encountering nature in all its wonder rather than by simply setting out to measure it by “rule and line”. However, the Romantics, by raising our experience of nature to the level of pure emotion, robbed it, in turn, of its necessary ambiguity and sometimes harsh modalities.

John Keats

Perhaps it is most surprising then, that it was that pillar of Victorian taste, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who first recognized that such an ecstatic view of nature (or ‘the pathetic fallacy’ as the critic John Ruskin also spoke of) didn’t quite coincide with the reality that presented itself to our discerning eye. He was right to be disturbed in what he saw as “nature red in tooth and claw.” We could no longer view the natural world as being there to serve us: it is indifferent to what we think of it and functions by its own laws. Clearly, this shift in perspective caused great shock, as well as the intellectual necessity to engage with an awareness of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as it grew ever more prominent.

With the rise of modernism in the early 20^th century artists made a clear and abrupt fracture with the past and some of the quaint notion discussed above, striving instead for an accuracy of perception, which the American poet Wallace Stevens described as an “accuracy with respect to the structure of reality”. While all modernists were preoccupied with this notion, the interpretation of what this meant was often quite varied and even divergent. For Ezra Pound, the unit of such a reality was the Image, a truer basis he believed for art to build itself upon over the neat rhetorical devices and tidiness of old current (Edwardian) forms. T.S. Eliot took this further with explorations of fractured psychological states, recorded in works (such as The Wasteland) that shift from one fragmentary experience to another, searching for some form of order in the confusion of experience. And for others, like Stevens (again), reality was the product of the imagination as it encounters and, in turn, shapes the world. Only with this form of imaginative and constant engagement, he argued, could the dynamic order of the universe be revealed. These are hardly notions of accuracy that a scientist would recognise, even those faced by the New Physics of General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics in the opening decades of the 20^th century. The “rule and line” of art was still a somewhat different enterprise than that of the caliper and telescope.

Wallace Stevens

 But we may come to the question as artists: What are we being accurate toward in the end: the objective facts of the world, or our experience of being in that world? In recent times, we have come increasingly to think of accuracy as being synonymous with the precise, reproducible certainties of scientific truth, with Stephen Hawking stating lately that “science has made philosophy redundant”. One wonders what he thinks of the contribution of the arts to human knowledge. The great search, now, in science is  for what is popularly called a Theory of Everything. It is a deeply important undertaking and, should it ever be achieved, would be of unimaginable significance, both for science and society.

Having said that, should we not challenge such a grand – if not grandiose – term, the Theory of Everything. It seems to take a limited view of what we mean by that all encompassing word. Such an explanation would, in the end, simply be one of the material universe and the aspects of that universe described by physics alone. It wouldn’t help us decipher the genome, for example, or indeed, untangle the nature of consciousness. As such, it would ultimately have very little to say about the experience of living; that deeply subjective narrative in which we live out each of our lives.

For me, science is not just a steady procession of unassailable facts, produced dispassionately by purely rational means. It is also a process of trial and error, instinct and hunches, driven often by profound curiosity. The story of the history of our understanding of light itself, demonstrates this point well. Perception is so crucial to living everyday life as we all know yet, when used more precisely, it can become also an instrument of scientific inquiry as well as artistic scrutiny, as the three artists in this exhibit demonstrate in very different ways. But we cannot have perception without light and our ideas about light has had a long and interesting history.

Ibn Al-Haytham

The standard version tells us that in antiquity, Plato among others, proposed what is called the ‘Emission Theory’, arguing that light travelled from the eye to the object it perceived in a direct line. We clearly now know this to be wrong. What may come as a surprise was how long Emission Theory persisted, but also that it wasn’t, in fact, that giant Newton (again) who first overthrew it, though this is taken as the standard narrative in the history of science. No, this notion of light was proposed six centuries earlier by the Persian scholar Ibn Al-Haytham (popularly known as Alhazen) who conducted a series of experiments on light while under house arrest, proving irrefutably that light travels in straight lines from the object of observation to the eye, demonstrating this fact by creating (most probably the first) camera obscura in his small room by placing a heavy black curtain across it and making a small aperture at its centre, the rooftops and spiking minarets of Cairo projected upside down onto the wall opposite. It is this last detail - upside-down - that proves the assertion. Alhazen also first explained refraction, reflection, spherical aberration and the magnifying power of lenses, though sadly little of his work and findings were disseminated in Europe, and Newton certainly wasn’t aware of his forerunner. This is not to reduce Newton’s claim also on these ideas and he was, indeed, the first to explain the spectrum of light that Keats found so anathema to his sensibility and feeling for the natural world. For me, this history alone becomes a fascination in itself. It reminds us that science doesn’t always proceed linearly and is, in the end, also a very human undertaking. In short, there is a story to science that goes beyond a mere ledger of facts and falsities.

And where then does art stand in such a schema? It’s hard to know what possible direct function it may provide to science, at least within the realms of its own methodology. Some would say, I’m sure, it has nothing to offer at all. And for art’s part, does science unweave the rainbow as Keats’ suggested and rob nature of its direct power over our imaginations? Can artists exploit the insights of science and yet bestow on it to the quality of imaginative encounter?

Cassandra Eustace 'What Lies Between Repeated Differences'

I think it is fair to argue that while science offers no criticism of the arts, it also offers no real meaningful place for it in its own enterprise and perhaps this is at the peril of potential hubris. It is certain in recent years, that there is a kind of slippage going on in  science towards an attitude of all-knowingness – or, at least a quest and belief to reach such a point in the future. However, it does sometimes seem that this quest is pursued at the expense of (and respect for) other modes of knowledge such as art, myth and experience itself, furtively moving  towards a general disenchantment through explanation, both in terms of the natural world and our place within it.

This then, inevitably leads to the question: what is arts relationship to science and can it have a meaningful discourse with it? I think we have to be clear here and say that the arts and the sciences serve different, though no less important, functions. Science’s job is to examine disparate phenomena and find a law or theory that shows how they are connected. This hypothesis is then tested and if proven true gives us an ‘objective’ truth. Art also tries to find patterns of connections and draw unexpected material together to form a coherent work, but it can never aspire to the empiricism of science, nor should it. In the end, a poem or any art-work can only persuade rather than prove. It captures something of the ‘subjective’ experience of living (even as it wrestles, at times, with abstraction), though by means that make such an experience recognisable or comprehensible to another person. We might borrow an important concept from science and call this a form of ‘resonance’.

Richard Forrest 'Truncated Tetrahedron'

I would suggest that art that engages with scientific ideas helps us to explore and see (in a sense) both the wonder and insight that science has provided us with and in the process we may humanise such ‘objective’ knowledge as we try weave it into the fabric of lived experience. Art is uniquely placed to help us to make sense of our relationship to it, as well as asking the question: how do you live in such a world with such knowledge? A poem, for example, can be said to exist in a fictional space. Yet, it is accurate of something. The truth of imagination is just as important as the bare nature of the facts. The places we create in the imagination feel just as real as the concrete places we inhabit in our lives, yet imaginative accuracy is judged, as such, by a different set of criteria than the scientific connotation of that word. It deals with the contradictory nature of our inner lives, not just the outer one.

Roseanne Lynch from 'Exposures 1-7'

And perhaps by creating work that draws on science, as in this exhibit, we – as artists in different forms – are attempting, through such an engagement, to bring these seemingly abstract and even distant ideas into some form of imaginative resonance, so that they too may form part of the fabric of our reality in the process; that such ‘ideas’ may also be experienced as well as understood. Science brings us new and deep knowledge of how the universe functions through theory and law, but as human beings we have a  deep desire and need to feel connected to both place and our place within it. It seems to me that science does not unweave the rainbow as Keats suggested all those years ago, but offers us both new knowledge and perspectives regarding nature that artists can examine and engage with at the level of the imagination as well as the cerebral cortex; and that in doing so, the two disciplines can create a meaningful exchange of perspectives and a balanced view of life, one that is accurate to the facts but also, crucially, felt.

The Infinite Line [A Search for the Unknown]

Curators:        

Maeve Lynch          http://www.maevelynch.com/     

Sophie Behal           http://www.sophiebehal.com/     

Artists:           
Cassandra Eustace http://crawfordexhibitions.com/exxit/?portfolio=cassandra-eustace 

Richard Forrest       http://www.richardforrest.info/

Roseanne Lynch     http://roseannelynch.wordpress.com/about/


Art Photo Credit:    Roseanne Lynch

'Reykjavik' - video-poem

Here is a short film based on my poem 'Reykjavik' from my new collection On Light & Carbon.

A very special thanks to film-maker Bill Bulmer for all his hard work and creative insight in putting it together. I've always thought that putting poetry to images is an interesting, but worthwhile, challenge and I'm really delighted with the results.

So here it is then. Hope you enjoy it.

You can also find a higher quality, large screen format, version of the piece on Vimeo at the following link: Reykjavik.

TEXT:

Reykjavik

 

At first it was the word I heard,

simply the word. The throat tightens

and tongue taut, to spit out the sharp v

the clipped k’s. The rumble of the ja

in the cave of the mouth echoes a harsh

landscape: Rey-k-ja-vik.

 

Then there was a grey canvas that lay

empty for days, just hanging there

somewhere inside the mind, swaying

to the thrum of that syncopated word

(it a mumbled mantra of sorts).

 

Today it is a grey sea, a grey sky rising

from it, flexing a heavy swell and fall,

coughing up a white froth. From below

the seal-god comes, calling from

his underworld: swim deep, cross

the sea, how else will you learn to speak?

 

Blue is my world now that I follow him.

We weave a slow course beneath the fishing boats,

soundlessly dodging the nets they drag behind them.

He has brought me to the waiting room

of myself across the blue corridor of ocean.

But I must not be fooled, for soon

I will stand alone on a glacial shore.

 

            *

 

The waves lash against the rocks. I crawl

up from the surf, scramble over shells and stones

and the thunder of seagulls that fills the world.

The salty light burns my eyes – colours are washed

and metallic here. A sharp wind licks my skin.

It is a messenger of the snow – follow, follow.

 

 

A city squats not far from here.

 

 

 

 

(I suppose it is a city like all others: people

busy in the shops and streets, cars going past

in a steady flow, conversation shuttled

along the counters of restaurants and pubs –

it is the currency of the living blood.)

 

 

I do not seek such comforts this morning.

It is the violence of genesis I’m after: the waters

breaking, the red mess of afterbirth, the first sounds

garbled out into the weak daybreak. I begin to walk.

With each step the years dissolve. I strip back self

layer by layer till there is little left:

the scrawling in a bird’s nest, the mysterious

writings on the underside of a stone,

the windswept syllable of the moon.

The word forms again on my lips. Reykjavik.

 

The place is named. I return to where I began.

A window. A desk. A piece of paper and pen.

The night huddles against the pane,

I all alone in my hidden den.

from On Light & Carbon (London: Ward Wood Publishing, 2013)