Notebook M

Gillian Savigny’s Notebook M imagines what scientific creativity might accomplish if given the space to play, free of the burden of empirical proof and the need to control meaning. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s own Notebook M, in which he brought his scientific sensibility towards decidedly unscientific notions of metaphysics, morals, imagination, and expression, in this collection the poet dons a lab coat and brings together the techniques and procedures of poetry and science. The result is a remarkably accomplished first collection of poetry. Natural selection becomes a technique to pull poems from Darwin’s prose, in a series of found poems. Metaphor becomes an experiment — a way of testing hypotheses about the nature of being and seeing. Savigny manipulates the lyric mode to address issues pertinent to both poets and scientists: issues of authorship, originality, copyright, and value. Invested with wonder, mystery, wit, and pathos, these poems strain against their own procedures and logic, affirming the wild, expressive potential of words.