Songs of Science

...The irony of Darwin's title, The Descent of Man, was not lost on the language-conscious Victorians, who felt that in this new perspective they had suffered a fall from the hope of Divine ordinance, especially an eternal life of which the earthly one was merely a shadow...

...Kenney is both...

...Kenney revels in an old-fashioned American fascination with mechanics...

...In "The Olive Wood Fire," Kinnell borrows his mentor's sense that God no longer watches over the world by describing how he used to rock his son, Fergus, before the fireplace when the boy had awakened from nightmares...

...The poet explains that "the sequence turns on that trick of memory which stacks our years like pancakes, perpendicular to time, so to speak, cutting through any number at once at a marked, recurring point...

...Even Biblical fundamentalists who reject evolutionary theory will often subscribe to "Social Darwinian" demonstrations of survival of the fittest in the marketplace...

...Kinnell has abjured it, however...

...He has managed to turn scientific concept and terminology into verse as well...

...Much of ThePast was inspired by personal changes in his life: divorce, children growing up, the death of friends...

...The first supposes that creation ticks along according to a preset plan...

...But, looking out through the farmhouse's handblown crown glass windows, he can feel Einstein's variables breaking the flow of the machine: here once upon a time somewhere some lively window's piper spun his spirit out in molten glass, each pane a breath, a globe of flame, concentric with the atmosphere—as every other sphere from birth is bound to be, expanding on the current myth, where every note goes flat, excepting earth...

...Laughter is our stuttering in a language we can't speak yet...

...Kenney's style can no longer be called traditional...

...Kenney's style is musical, mind-teasing, sensuous...

...I have always intended to live forever,/but even more, to live now...

...Physics," the concluding section, poses such scientific riddles as "Who knows when first/aortic arches/registered/ an ocean's surge,/or slipped awake,/or stirred asleep;/how many tides/had ebbed until/the tiny seahorse/heart could leap...

...Its star-studded face appears on the book jacket...

...The cider mill, "with all these clanking, die cast, palm polished bits and parts," creates "a clutter [that] reminds me a little of the elements of literature—crippled dance steps, disassembled stories, half-hummed tunes, all common property—disintegration products, say, odd cogs and pawls, inert, cooling, fissile litter left over with the confusion of much common sense, as it sometimes seems, from the decay of the clockwork universe...

...His feats of verbal engineering build artistic diagrams—on the model of David Rittenhouse' s Grand Orrery at Princeton...

...Behind, the world made of wishes grows dark...

...Like a watchmaker, he is capable of perceiving the most intricate details and patterns without once losing sight of the motion of the whole...

...In an intricate Preface, the author explains how his main poetic sequence, "Apples," sets up its verses like wheels turning wheels, "eachaminiatureorrery," composing a whole grand one...

...In common with the rest of us, he would prefer to settle for the comprehensible: "A simple clockwork world, this farm...

...Kenney's opening section, "Hours," consists of 10 sonnets, arranged in pairs, attached by a riddling quatrain...

...Criticism uses machine similes to bludgeon works that sound clever rather than imaginative...

...Though physics may be too technical for a mass audience, "relativity" has revolutionized moral attitudes...

...Old-fashioned narratives continue to treat time as if it operated like a piece of thread unwinding from a spool, and man as if he were a unique phenomenon of nature...

...Thepoem spins a kaleidoscope of seasons with apples, trees, stars, and human lives revolving in their cycles and intersecting with one another...

...Richard Kenney's Orrery (Atheneum, 108 pp., $17.95) takes its name from those clockwork machines "designed to model the movements of the entire known solar system, according to Newtonian and Copernican principles...

...The olive wood fire had burned low...

...This personification of nature remains dear to many contemporary poets, who see themselves as shamans...

...Orrery juggles two contradictory balls of theory...

...Ahead, if not tomorrow then never, shines only what is...

...And every fresh image releases a family of others, all performing with the cunning agility of wind-up toys...

...In Kinnell's post-Darwinian world, truth means facing the knowledge that our life-cycle consists of no more or less than growth, propagation and decay, and that we fulfill our function by living it: The rails may never meet, O Fellow Euclideans, for you, for me...

...Speaking both of history and of his own youth, Kinnell recalls that "back then, dryads lived in these oaks;/these rocks were altars, which often asked/blood offerings...

...In "The Waking," lovers during the act imagine that they are demi-gods lost in an arcadian landscape, but must come to "and remember they are bones and at once laugh/naturally again...

...So what if we groan...

...In The Evolution ofthe Flightless Bird (1984), his first book, his own voice sometimes lost the fight to free itself from the influence of other dense poets—Hopkins and the early Robert Lowell, in particular...

...I' 11 keep Sir Isaac Newton's/ world, all crankcase cogs and whirring gears...

...On Poetry SONGS OF SCIENCE BY PHOEBE FETTINGELL History was the controlling trope for 19th-century writers: Novelists, essayists, poets, and playwrights all affirmed their hopes for mankind's progress, or their fears about the decline and fall of civilization, by pointing to the record...

...This complex poem concerns a number of seasons and years on a Vermont farm whose industry is making cider jelly...

...Apples" employs looser, more changeable forms of verse than "Hours...

...This vision of a childlike deity who sleeps through human horrors manages to combine Christian iconography with 20th-century agnosticism...

...It is continually bumped by the second, Einstein's insistence that the cosmos is not a machine, not sensible according to our understanding...

...The Past is an attempt to reconcile oneself to the fact that one cannot re-enter times that are gone...

...The flames remind the father of the horrors of the Vietnam war as seen on television: One such time, fallen half-asleep myself, I thought I heard a scream —a flier crying out in horror as he dropped fire on he didn't know what or whom, or else a child thus set aflame— and sat up alert...

...I hope these readers will discover Richard Kenney's poetry too...

...The moment/I have done one or the other, I here swear,/I will come back from the living and enter/death everlasting: consciousness defeated...

...But literature still frequently shrinks from science...

...The discoveries of Darwin and Einstein seem, at first glance, to have shifted our metaphor to science...

...We doubted that pre-Darwinian language would let us...

...Kinnell isadescendantofRilke, the poet who first suggested that the material world may be superior to the heavenly one...

...And that as post-Darwinians it was up to us to anthropomorphize the world less and animalize, vegetablize, and mineralize ourselves more...

...That's our noise...

...No poet since Auden has made the adjective "mechanical" as much of a compliment as Kenney does...

...In my arms lay Fergus, fast asleep, left cheek glowing, God...

...The subjects of Orrery provide a vehicle for his unique timbre, helping him accomplish the wedding of technology and literature...

...In"TheSeekonk Woods," his image for a kind of afterlife becomes the stink of a muskrat-skin cap that cannot lose the scent of its dead animal...

...Kenney understands how hard it is to face the realization that we are not central to the universe, how badly we want to remake it in our image...

...A lucky person can, like James Wright, feel kinship with "salamanders, spiders and mosquitoes," and so imaginatively pick up "back evolutionary stages"—rather like dropped stitches in knitting, evidently...

...Although Kinnell has not invented an evolutionary mode of speech, his poems certainly exemplify a way of thinking that has embraced a biological perception of the world...

...If there's pleasure in the sequence," the poet remarks, "part of it ought to be in watching them turn...

...Yet his consideration of these losses forms around his conviction that man is part of the animal kingdom, and must be stripped "back down/to hair, flesh, blood, bone, the base metals," to be seen for what he is...

...In ThePast (Houghton Mifflin, 57 pp., $13.95) GalwayKinnell reports a dinner table discussion on this problem with Richard Hugo shortly before his death: We agreed that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets almost had to personify, it was like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the only way they could imagine to keep the world from turning into dead matter...

...Recently, a growing audience has come to admire the lyrical essays of such scientists as Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, Gerald Weissmann, and Oliver Sacks...

...He makes the reader's intellect stretch to capture a scattershot of allusions, yet also conjures up the smell of fruit, the heft of the cider press, the time-lapse speed of an orchard as it buds, blooms, bears, then grows bare before winter...