JM Coetzee Reviews Strange Attractors by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney
Verdict: carrot
Here’s something you don’t see very often: a book review by Nobel laureate JM Coetzee. Not unsurprisingly, it’s come to BOOK SA via an unusual vector, the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
Under Coetzee’s unwavering eye: Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, a compilation of 150 poems informed by “number theory, the infinitesimal calculus, and the mathematics of indeterminacy” – and possibly even some trig, shudder – whose common theme is love. Coetzee-spotters will know that the author once created a computer programme that generated poetry (and was not displeased with the results), so he’s in his element here.
His extended verdict is that there are “no duds among the poems, but overall they tend to be witty rather than profound”. Our extended verdict is “how utterly delightful to have dug this up”:
The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically. The spark of true poetr —according to one influential school of poets—flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together. Scientific discoveries often start with a hunch that there is some connection between apparently unrelated phenomena.
So there are a priori grounds for thinking of poetry and mathematics together, as two rarefied forms of symbolic activity based on the power of the human mind to detect hidden analogies. In other words, an anthology like Strange Attractors, which brings together a hundred and fifty poems with some degree of mathematical content, makes more a priori sense than, say, a collection of famous speeches with some mathematical content.
Book Details
- Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney
EAN: 9781568813417
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Apr
