Elisabeth Kelly, Mind Mathematics (HybridDreich, 2021)
Mind Mathematics is a poetic experiment and eye-opening experience. While we tend to associate poets with descriptions of shores and trees, Kelly’s poetic persona shifts the focus to shapes and degrees.
Intangible, internalised feelings are mapped onto a geometric landscape. In ‘Lines’, ‘hope [is] paralleled, across the field’; in ‘Rhombus’, yearning is grounded in concrete measurements: ‘One hundred and eighty degrees away,/ you walk,/ leaving patterns of solitude/ on a shifting beach’. Kelly constructs her poetic environment with deft skill, stripping nature to its core mathematical elements before ‘silently building us a new picture, a new whole’ (‘Patterns of You’).
Like wholeness, balance is a recurring theme. To a logical mind, the practice of mathematics possesses a reassuring quality, an unequivocal certainty amidst the chaos of the outside world. In ‘Subtrahend’, the poet strives for stability. She laments efforts ‘to subtract,/ to lose parts of me’ that she has spent a lifetime trading with ‘desperately attempting to add’. This ‘sum/ I hoped would balance’ represents the elusive ideal towards which we all struggle; perfect equilibrium is harder to find in real life than on paper.
You set the constant,
‘My Equation’
the old beech glinting,
the balance in my equation.
The pamphlet’s success comes from its portrayal in poetic form of an experience of the world through a purely mathematical perspective. The poet uses this contradiction to unite two seemingly irreconcilable worldviews and in so doing enriches our overall outlook. Kelly reconciles mathematics and poetry, science and art, logic and creativity, and demonstrates that what falls under these labels should not so hastily be kept apart. In the end, ‘Mind Mathematics’ is a beautiful expression of unity.
Elisabeth Kelly, Mind Mathematics (HybridDreich, 2021). Available here.
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