Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, June 29, 2008

Late Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub mined greater treasure from the sciences than any other poet I know. In "The Sorcerer's Lament," he speaks as someone who thrives in duality (i.e., the art/science dichotomy): "[My] great magic is that I'm/still here. With a medium-sized/halo around both heads." Holub's scientific proclivity crosses the battle line so boldly drawn by the English Romantics, who fired flaming volleys at reason and its territories. In 1820, John Keats's "Lamia" dubbed science "cold philosophy" -- a destroyer of natural charms: "Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings/Conquer all mysteries by rule and line . . . , Unweave a rainbow." But Holub swings open the operating-theater door in "Heart Transplant" and reveals technology's new beauty:

It's like falling from an airplane

before the masked face of a creator

who's dressed in a scrub suit

and latex gloves.

Now they are bringing, bedded in melting ice,

the new heart,

like some trophy

from the Eightieth Olympiad of Calamities.

Atrium is sewn to atrium,

aorta to aorta,

three hours of eternity

coming and going. . . .

A few recent poets have peppered their work with technical gobbledy-gook, but only Holub has made lovely -- at a cellular level -- how both hemophilia and interferon function. The way "Star Wars" stopped sci-fi movies from being cold, Holub warms up science for unscientific thinkers. Only he can make a knowing argument that the scientific method is akin to love in its relentless pursuit. Here's his "Ode to Joy":

You only love

when you love in vain.

Try another radio probe

when ten have failed,

take two hundred rabbits

when a hundred have died:

only this is science.

You ask the secret.

It has just one name:

again.

In the end

a dog carries in his jaws

his image in the water,

people rivet the new moon.

I love you.

Like caryatids

our lifted arms

hold up time's granite load.

and defeated

we shall always win.

The ideas of the narcissistic dog carrying his own image and the moon being riveted bring up in metaphor what poets have feared from science -- the self-involved, inhumane machine -- which is why Holub's phrase "I love you" arrives so aptly.

(The Holub poems appear in "Intensive Care: Selected and New Poems." Oberlin College Press. 1996. )

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."