Book Review: From Nothing by Daniel Tobin

Reviewed by David Keplinger

From Nothing
Poems by Daniel Tobin
Four Way Books, March 2016
$15.95; 39 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1935536697

Recently I attended the memorial service of a former head of robotics at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, a man who helped construct one of the early particle accelerators. In 1964, he was working there when Arno Penzias first detected evidence of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (known as the CMB) that proved the expansion of the universe in the theory currently referred to as The Big Bang. In a pleasing twist of coincidence and poetic confluence, I had also just begun reading Daniel Tobin’s From Nothing, which chronicles the lead up to that discovery. The collection retraces the intellectual and spiritual life of a Belgian Catholic priest by the name of Georges Lamaître, whose calculations posited a universe that comes from a singularity, out of nothing, ignited by hydrogen and thrust outward, and whose galaxies were still today accelerating away from its center like raisins—Lamaître once said—in a loaf of rising bread.

From Nothing is a small book at 39 pages, each poem exactly 24 lines, divided neatly into 8 tercets. But it is a big book in its ambition to retell the plot of Lamaître’s fascinations, which expand and branch away and reconnoiter much in the same way his modeled cosmos did. In the collection there are also appearances, as persona poems, from some of Lamaître’s contemporaries—notably Edwin Hubble, who took full credit for the concept, through the Belgian’s predictions and equations preceded his by two years—and references to Newton, Einstein, Schrödinger, Gödel, and a host of others who shaped our current knowledge of physics at the observable and quantum levels.

As a book about physics, if judged by its material alone, the collection is brilliantly achieved. The repeating form and copious notes at the end of the sequence at once ground the reader, maintain certain controlled expectations, and clearly define our terms. Each poem studies its subject (some look at Lamaître’s boyhood, others his spiritual instruction, his service during WWI, his physics, and his lifetime of conversations and arguments among his peers) to a predetermined degree of exploration, then concludes with a quiet shutting of the door. Nevertheless, readers find themselves in the thick of some of the most raucous theoretical principles in 100 years of physics, from general relativity to quantum mechanics, astrophysics, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. This without a drop of reductive summary. One feels one is reading—and processing—the very thoughts of Lamaître himself.

From Nothing takes us mostly on a chronological journey that begins, consistent with the book’s title, in a modest childhood in a late 19th century Europe before the wars, where Lamaître is set upon a blanket for the photographer, a genderless baby in a white gown. The first lines of the book evoke the project this way:

To begin from nothing, holiness in perihelion:
though one must not proclaim it, but let the matter
spin along its poles into the bright entanglements

Which is what this volume does. In its conceptualization of a nothing, fertile with something, it calls out more to a divine randomness than to Apollo. We will hear of a generation of physicists, their entanglements of violence, nuclear fission, and fascism, as well as the spiritual emergency and emergence that resulted for the believer who was also a gifted questioner. Though the answers received via equation did not always suit the predisposition of the mathematician, Lamaître keeps moving through his questions and solutions toward wherever the truth should point. Unlike Einstein, who stated famously “Your calculations correct, your physics abominable” (and who is quoted here in the poem “Proscenium”), Lamaître responds by saying of his spirit-work and his numbers, “There are two paths to truth; I have chosen both.”

Lamaître’s universe reveals itself to be an infinitely expanding thought bubble, full of messy contradictions and mysteries at the subatomic level, space-time conundrums and lots of smoke and mirrors. But the chaos in Tobin’s book length poem is controlled by these 24 line containers, each a test within an air-tight accelerator whose particles are opposing ideas about the nature of things—one side observable at the Newtonian level, and the other quantum, hazy, seemingly capricious. The strict form allows Tobin great freedom with his language and his astonishingly informed ideas about Lamaître’s inner life—and more generally about the life of the mind in the early and mid-20th century. We have the Catholic language of the “green chausable” of the priest, the “black soutane…in consort to cross and ciborium…” the “quires in a Book of Hours.” And we have the equally exalted language of physics: its “cicatrizing light,” its stars in “radical collapse,” its infinities, its “ylem”—a Middle English word for the primeval substance, coined by physicist George Gammow. The lines are so often uninterrupted by commas or periods, even at six or seven beats per unit. There is a Whitmanesque, engined energy to this poetry that is like the runaway universe itself. Consider the passage quoted above. In the first line the comma serves as medial caesura; in the second the comma precedes a brief change of mind; in the third line there is no comma, and as a reader I feel the full reach and stretch of its trochaic rhythm. So much of the collection wonders and pushes by the steam of sound alone, reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s concept of a “music of what happens,” how apparently unconnected phenomena know a symmetry akin to harmony in music. Tobin himself calls up Heaney’s sentiment in From Nothing, alongside other references to Yeats and the Romanian poet Paul Celan.

By 1964, when Bell Labs was gathering the brightest young minds to engage in practicing the equations of the master theorizers before them, Lamatire was nearing the end of his life. While From Nothing may not be the book that repositions him among those whose minds shaped our contemporary ideas about the universe, it provides an unforgettable picture of Lamaître’s contributions. Daniel Tobin is a masterful poet who works from vibration outward—first music, then form, finally ideas—like the cosmos he describes. From Nothing is one of those books that exalts the mind by its unflinching meticulousness and intellectual breadth. But its greatest accomplishment is the poetry: he holds all this movement so perfectly still.             

David Keplinger is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018). He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, D.C.