A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen
- Publisher
- Brick Books
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2023
- Subjects
- Death, Physics, Women Authors
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eBook
- ISBN
- 9781771316033
- Publish Date
- Apr 2023
- List Price
- $13.99
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Description
A radiant collection that employs the lyric poem as a tool for scientific and emotional exploration.
Erin Noteboom's A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen takes exact and exquisite measurement of what carries a voice through illness, grief, loss, and through the failures and triumphs of work and love. Various theories and hypotheses are tested in these poems: sadness is knowledge and science "is only half a turn from love." Whether Noteboom is examining the life and work of physicist Marie Curie or compressing imagistic gems from plaintive, important questions like "What lasts?", there is everywhere in these poems a shadow-scratching curiosity, vital research, and an acknowledgement of the long waits in a life between discoveries. An essential marriage between the arts and science, A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen is full of poems that readers will savour long after closing their eyes and raising the vial.
About the author
Erin Noteboom is a physicist turned poet turned children's novelist, whose honours include the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award, the CBC Literary Award for poetry, and a Governor General's Award. She has previously published two volumes of poetry, Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska (2003) and Seal Up the Thunder (2005), as well as a memoir, The Mongoose Diaries: Excerpts from a Mother's First Year (2007). Her novels for young readers (published under her married name, Erin Bow) are Plain Kate, Sorrow's Knot, The Scorpion Rules, The Swan Riders, and the middle-grade novel Stand on the Sky, which was winner of the 2020 Governor General's Award for Young People's Literature. Erin's day job is writing about things like black holes and quantum gravity at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario.
Excerpt: A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen (by (author) Erin Noteboom)
Curie in Love
"If a radioactive substance is placed in the dark in the vicinity of the closed eye or of the temple, a sensation of light fills the eye." — Marie Curie, doctoral dissertation, 1903
The sensation of light
is light. There is no way for her to know it.
She is so young and so in love, marrying
an equal, choosing for her gown a navy dress
she can wear in laboratories. Hand in hand
they slip through the university courtyard —
Pierre and Marie Curie, in the world before the war.
One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night
to perceive on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes —
the bottles and capsules of our work. That light
marbles and embarnacles them both,
turns their fingers strange and fibrous.
Soon enough he cannot rise from bed.
It was really a lovely sight and always new to us.
She loses twenty pounds. Two pregnancies.
There is no way for her to know
that her light will soon paint
gunsights and watch dials, that it is ticking
through her body, his body, faster than time.
What she has understood is astonishing enough:
the atom, active. It is
as if marbles were found to be breathing out.
As if stones were found to speak.
Sick and stumbling, Pierre is struck
by a cart of military equipage. He passes untouched
under the hooves of six horses. Untouched
between the front wheels, between the turns
of chance and miracle, before six tons
and the back wheel open his skull
and kill him instantly.
The spare coffin slaps closed.
And the deterministic world.
That light.
She has no way of knowing
it is ionizing radiation, lighting the eye gel
the way a cooling pool is lit
around a great reactor. Her hair was thick then,
and thickly piled. Her fingers smooth.
Her thighs like marble. She closes her eyes
and raises the vial.
The Common Swift
Consider in its turn the common swift.
There is new evidence that a swift can stay aloft
two hundred days. Scientists are puzzled,
not over how, but why. Consider the work, they note,
of sleeping in flight: the alertness demanded,
the tacks and turns it takes
to lean on wind. Even a gliding bird would expend
a small but constant effort.
For such a cost, there must be benefit.
That is the equation of science, which is only
half a turn from love. Consider a marriage,
surely no less common, or marvellous,
than swifts. Surely no less a nest
built in the air.
Editorial Reviews
"Erin Noteboom's is an elemental poetry of bones, salt, water, dust, and at the same time a celebration on all things as holy. [H]er gift is to flare the ordinary detail as well as the extraordinary event into vision, meaning, and the maginification of spirit." — Jane Hirshfield
"I have long been a fan of Erin Noteboom's poetry. And no wonder. These new poems are as good as it gets." — Lorna Crozier