Richard Kenney Zeroes In

...Mingling those various vocabularies, The Invention of the Zero holds out the possibility that by retracing the path we have followed, we may happen upon some means to light up the road ahead...

...The narrator's experience of the event, though, is considerably more complex: What initially struck him as a revelation comparable to the Egyptian Sun King's image of Godhead??the primal force behind creation??remains in his memory as "the day they lanced/the surfaces of things, and bled from a fist/of warm earth the quick inhuman light of stars...

...All of these issues are dramatized in Kenney's dialogues between God and Orbiter, who seeks to grasp why his species is drawn to play with the very fire that might incinerate it, not to mention the ecosystem that keeps it alive...

...A AT bottom, The Invention of the Zero is not a collection of gripping yarns, though, but rather a sober consideration of the consequences of human ingenuity...

...And one instantly sees as well Adam and Eve...

...A lengthy essay might be devoted to charting the poem's various movements...

...The poet's father, the source of this tale, was a survivor...

...When the first sin, according to Genesis, bestowed the Godlike power of knowledge upon humanity, it brought death into the world at the same time...

...Because it represents nothing, zero readily conjures up annihilation or erasure...

...The real enemies, in this "Bali Hai/Recast for Lunatics by the Marquis de Sade," are boredom and the frustrated desire for conflict...

...Yet the sign of the unbroken circle can just as well stand for wholeness??evoking the orbits of planets, or the original egg of primal matter that formed in the instants after the Big Bang...

...driven out of fertile Eden to wrest their existence henceforth from a hostile environment...

...Obviously the implications of matter transmogrified into pure energy are sickening in hindsight: Hiroshima, the nightmarish Cold War fear of a nuclear holocaust, the cancers and genetic damage inflicted on the people and other creatures who had the misfortune to live downwind of the fallout...

...Richard Kenney's The Invention of the Zero (Knopf, 157 pp...

...All four story-poems describe real events, reported to Kenney by the individuals who experienced them...

...Literally, it harks back to the revolutionary Arabic innovation??the symbol 0??that liberated mathematics from the cumbersome limitations of classical numbers...

...His retelling is so full of suspense and gritty detail, it is as if he underwent their travails himself...

...Throughout history that essential question has been recast any number of ways??by primitive mythologies and the great religions, in literature, philosophy and psychology, and most recently in scientific discourse...

...The first one serves virtually as a prologue...

...alas, the briefest survey must suffice here...

...Typhoon" and "Lucifer" recount further disasters...

...Some of the most profound findings??including the theories of evolution, natural selection and the Big Bang??have resisted assimilation into our culture, dividing science from tradition and religion...

...we receive the message, still...

...Mark Twain...

...The former concerns the naval mismanagement that brought about the deaths of 790 American sailors on December 18 and 19, 1944, when the Third Fleet sailed straight into a violent Pacific storm...

...Take the diorama in the recently opened Hall of Human Biology and Evolution at New York's Museum of Natural History...

...Reading those powerful lines, an illuminating fusion of scientific explanation and poetic comprehension, transfigured my understanding of atomic power...

...The naked humanoids, with his arm protectively embracing her shoulder, reflect through posture and expression the fearful bewilderment made familiar by innumerable Renaissance depictions of the Fall of Man...

...Doomed to perform useless chores in a forgotten corner of the world, the soldiers find themselves immobilized by a spell their captain likens to the one Circe cast to turn Odysseus' crew into animals...

...The latter is about a near-fatal maiden parachute jump by a Navy Seal...

...His troops have been stationed there to defend against a possible Japanese air attack from the south...

...This consists of ingeniously linked prose passages from Isaac Newton, Herman Melville...

...We now live in an era of diminishing faith in the ideal of progress, and it is natural to make the intellectual jump between certain technological breakthroughs and the ambiguous legacy of the Fall...

...These accounts are threaded together by seven shorter lyrics??one for every day of the week (denoted by its ancient planetary symbol...

...The title brims with a multitude of associations...

...even the cave paintings discovered at Altamira, Font de Gaume and Lascaux??which find their place among the innumerable allusions woven into Kenney's text??seem to have been magical attempts by Stone Age hunters to enhance their ability to kill the great animals they depicted...

...Hence "the invention of the zero" operates as a trope for all powers of making and unmaking...

...Writers & Writing RICHARD KENNEY ZEROES IN BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Even in the final decade of this century, our culture is still struggling to graft the imagery of quarks, DNA, black holes, nuclear fusion, megabytes, and the like onto earlier notions of what makes the world tick...

...Similarly, the poem's onlooker at the Nevada test site compares a nuclear detonation with Agamemnon's signal lights: five beacons set on mountaintops...

...Other developments, such as modern medical techniques, stumble onto thorny ethical ground, while still others erode our environment??or worse, engender murderous capabilities...

...Readers of Kenney's previous volumes, The Evolution of the Flightless Bird (1984) and Orrery (1985), already know what pleasure he takes in the intricacies of form??whether those he crafts in his verses or the ones he studies in the workings of nature and machines...

...After all...

...No split between the humanities and the sciences here: Richard Kenney's Orbiter strives for the wholeness of understanding that might restore meaning and hope to our earthly endeavors...

...It is followed by the section entitled "A Colloquy of Ancient Men...

...The Encantadas" (which translates roughly as "the bewitched") is the second story, told by an Army captain commanding an antiaircraft battery in the Galapagos archipelago in 1944-45...

...what???the grace of Persepolis, the mathematics of Alexandria, the slow and careful masonry of even the simplest human dream...

...He realizes that in some way he and his men are irrevocably altering a culture, just as the fury of war elsewhere is changing humanity's expectations forever...

...where seeds and cycad cones and birdlimes/still arrive, by accident," the breeding ground for the peculiar adaptations of flora and fauna that gave rise to Charles Darwin's theories of evolution and natural selection...

...The issue it raises implicitly is: Does every invention result in destruction...

...they comprise a dialogue between God the Creator and "Orbiter"??the poet, or Everyman...

...Thus the scientific ideas that have been quickest to grab the popular imagination are those most easily tied in with the central myths of Western civilization...

...Since that proves not to be part of Tokyo's strategy, "two platoons of men with murder on their minds" are left as free from predators as the giant tortoises, finches, iguanas, and gooney birds that populate the islands...

...On that momentous day in 1944, he was ravished by "the beauty/of the thing evolving...

...One spark??how soon it leapt up all horizons, strata, time, destroying...

...The artist's representation of a scene 3.5 million years ago is meant to illustrate the formation of the remarkable Laetoli footprints first discovered in Tanzania in 1974...

...In some of his verses, Kenney links it to the "Ring of Fire" in the Pacific Ocean, that wheel of volcanic islands "where random DNA slimed out like thready spit/against the rock shore...

...Amusement on the island boils down to two activities: cutthroat chess tournaments and target practice on the local wildlife??reminding the narrator of Darwin's observation in his Beagle journal: "We may infer what havoc any new beast of prey must cause before the instincts of indigenous inhabitants become adapted to the stranger's craft or power...

...The title's deeper reference, however, is to the splitting of the atom, the harnessing of a power mighty enough to destroy the earth...

...a sun-disk, yellow-white, Ikhnaton's fireball, slowly knurling at its edges, turbid, losing outline, imbued bit by bit with color, incandescent, rising in a great upchurning cloud, first rose-pink, damask as the reddish desert (which it was) annealing in its own fire...

...In the title poem, a former airman recalls watching the first nuclear tests at Frenchman Flat in the Nevada desert...

...to chain the spark from east to west, from flaming Troy the good news blinked across the sea to the cold hearths of the Pelopponese: Word from the warlords of Mycenae...

...Against the backdrop of an erupting volcano, a male and a female australopithecine are crossing a plain thick in ash...

...In this third book he has developed an elaborate structure of intermeshed parts, rigged like gears and flywheels to put new spins on one another and keep the whole mechanism humming...

...S20) is a lyric excursion into the way we interweave scientific knowledge and the lore that continues to shape our lives...

...Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and nine other distinguished writers and scientists whose utterances have nourished Kenney's imagination...

...Kenney offers four narrative sagas, each related by a different persona, yet all centering around the final years of World War II and the development of the atom bomb...