POET TREMBLES ON THE VERGE OF SCIENCE

READING NATURE
By Robert M. Chute
59 pp.
Just Write Books. $9.95.

Reviewed by G. W. George


Robert Chute’s latest book of poetry deserves readers because he is onto something.

He is writing as a poet about what he as a scientist—a professional biologist—now sees in nature, not what poets have been seeing over the centuries. His is not the joyously beautiful nature that William Wordsworth saw in the daffodils, nor the God-revealing nature that William Cullen Bryant saw in the flight of a waterfowl, nor the ominously haunting nature of Poe’s raven and Coleridge’s albatross, nor the sweet nature of bees, birds, and bushes entranced by the music of a Greek god in Shelley’s “Hymn of Pan.” What Chute perceives is closer to what Pan discovered at the poem’s end:

I pursued a maiden, and clasp’d a reed:
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus.

Chute speaks similarly at the end of a poem on “Darwin’s Motors” about discovering how molecules interact in closed spaces: “Those evil twins, Random and Chance, at work again.” He deals with nature beneath the surface, with bacteria and parasites, genes and ganglia, patterns and procedures, fractals and picohertz. What Chute is onto is the difficulty of finding some kind of human, subjective meaning in the increasingly disconcerting discoveries of “objective” science.

Some of his poems are about people trying to invent meaning. In “Reverend Paley at the Seashore,” a man clinging to his religion speculates that a watch he finds amid sea shells came from “the same mysterious hand that patiently ground mountains down to make this sand, then melted some to make an hour glass, and then . . . .” Equally sad is the paleontologist in Chute’s poem, “Magician of the Charnel House,” who, realizing that whole species die, not just individuals, seeks comfort in reassembling their remains:

I am tragedian, Athenian.
I call upon the bones. They dance for me.

Using free verse with some internal rhyme, assonance, and alliteration, and interspersing the texts with thought-provoking visual collages, Chute comes at science’s surprises from multiple angles. In different poems, he wonders at the miraculousness of unique patterns that nature generates and then indifferently dissolves; observes how, by a kind of accident, birds that are white survive from bomb sites; describes how it takes a graph to show that millions of fish at times “come as one bound by the mesh of a net we can’t see”; and says the following in a poem about “faded echoes” and “pale illusions” . . .

two and two, usually, make four.
Those few fives and threes we call
error, or miracles, and carry on.

However, in another poem he contradicts Pan’s musical disillusionment, observing that the patterns of a dancing woman may seem “senseless or indifferent but they are not: the music wins.” This and a half-dozen humorous poems in the book retreat into cleverness from the confrontation between conventional “sense” and scientific perspective. But many of Chute’s poems deal with it directly. In one of the best and most beautiful in the book, Henry David Thoreau, the poet-naturalist of Walden fame, views a water plant, which he could describe in unpoetic terms, says Chute, of “inertia, surface tension, or diffraction,”

but thoughts creep in unbidden
as he notes: stem of Pontederia bent
by illusion—cohesive drops—broken light.

The title of that poem is a telling quotation from Thoreau that also, appropriately, prefaces Chute’s book: “Every Poet Trembles on the Verge of Science.”

 

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