The Constants of the Motion

Book excerpt: Poetry. In Roald Hoffmann's latest poetry collection, he casts his inquisitive mind and love for words and syntax on the worlds he encounters. In a winter retreat in inland Provence, he ponders the long-cultivated land around, and its little treasures. Midst that beauty, he cannot stop thinking of the wounds to his family in the Holocaust. Then, an intense interaction with the crafts community in the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina leads to a strong set of poems. A commission to write a poem for the 50th anniversary of the Watson and Crick paper might be rejected; it still yields three good poems, as does the puzzle of a Japanese mountain god who does not work at night, lest he frighten humans. Why? The collection ends in the forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, midst manzanita and redwoods, reaching for consilience. Roald loves words, and the conjunctions of sound and meaning that can be woven from them. From wherever in the world he has been (and that includes a desperate time in his childhood), he brings back a abiding feeling of quiet beauty, of science and nature at peace with each other.