Full Description
Like the ever-widening universe, Standard candles expands on Alice Major's earlier themes of family, mythology, and cosmology, teasing out subtle wonders in form and subject. Her voice resonates through experiments with old and new poetic forms as she imbues observed and imagined phenomena—from the centres of galaxies to the mysteries of her own backyard—with the most grounded and grounding moments of human experience. In Standard candles, readers will find an emotional dimension that seamlessly intersects with the dimensions of space and time. Fans of Alice Major will enjoy seeing her work through familiar themes, while readers new to her poetry will discover unexplored universes.
Alice Major emigrated from Scotland at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto before coming west to work as a weekly newspaper reporter. She served as Edmonton's first poet laureate and has been inducted into the city's cultural hall of fame. A widely-published author, she has won many distinctions. Her most recent book is Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science, which received the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction as well as a National Magazine Award gold medal. Her website is www.alicemajor.com.
Let us compare cosmologies
There is a beginning and a middle.
There is an arc of narrative.
There is a word, a large engraved initial.
There is imperative—
a cause, a god. Or not.
There is an end. A purpose.
Or maybe none. There is a plot
with reasons, reason. There is a circus,
a theatre stage of space and time.
There are equations at the bottom
or the top. There is a pantheon
of matter, motion, scattered photons.
And the questions every universe expects:
what came before? What happens next?
Contents
xi Sonnet for Valentine's
The set of all gods
2 The god of prime numbers
3 The god of infinities
4 The god of symmetry
5 The god of gravity
6 The god of salt
7 The god of kites and darts
8 The god of quantum uncertainty
9 The god of probabilities
10 The baker god
11 The god of automata
12 The god of teapots
14 The god of cats
16 The god of sparrows
17 The god of hearts
18 The jeweller god
19 The god of dark
20 The god of memory
21 The muse of universes
Ordinary matter
24 Ordinary matter
26 Vacuum fluctuations
27 The helium thoughts
28 Advice to the lovelorn
30 Three-body problem
31 Love in three dimensions
32 Heavy elements
33 Local bubble
34 Catechism
Standard candles
40 1 Address | 1959
42 2 Clouds of glory | 1908
45 3 Pythagorean theorem | 1965
46 4 Triangulation | 1808
49 5 The end of greatness | 2000
51 6 In the Castle of Stars | 1576
54 7 Supernova Type 1A | 1997
57 8 Then death returns
59 9 In all that void
60 10 Looking out to the dark | December 1928
62 11 d = (X- x)2 + (Y- y)2 + (Z- z)2 - c(T-t)2 | now
64 A prayer to bring you home
Muscle of difficulty
68 Muscle of difficulty
70 Yet another crack in the foundation
72 Day's eye
74 Expanding space
76 The movers' dilemma
78 Rectangularization of the morbidity curve
80 Now, that amphibious moment
81 To the generations that will live a thousand years
82 Last scattering surface
Let us compare cosmologies
86 1 Let us compare cosmologies
87 2 The Orphic follower
88 3 A pope
89 4 The evangelist
90 5 The philosophical skeptic
91 6 The nihilist
92 7 The totalitarian
93 8 The survivalist
94 9 The optimist
95 10 The magician
96 11 The baker
97 12 The consumer
98 13 The funeral director
99 14 The Manichean
100 15 The artist
Sins and virtues
102 Avarice
104 Lust
105 Gluttony
107 Envy
108 Pride
110 Anger
111 Sloth
113 Mercy
115 Hope
Shifting wavelengths
118 Tortoise and fern
120 Fingers of God
121 The barber's paradox
122 Zeno's paradox
123 Twin paradox
124 Sand reckonings: Eubulides' paradox
125 Honeycomb conjectures
127 Bee violet
128 Optical molasses
129 Life adapts to inhospitable environments
130 How to tell a Martian my heart is on the left
Underworlds
132 Persephone and I are underground
135 The outer dark
138 Cocytus
142 Niflheim
145 The man with no hands
147 Each of us the centre of a circle
Postscript
150 God submits a grant application to the Canada Council
153 Notes
163 Acknowledgements
