The Bactra Review: Occasional and eclectic book reviews by
Cosma Shalizi 20
The Transmutation Notebooks
Poems in the Voices of Charles and Emma Darwin
by Anne Becker
Washington, D. C.: Forest Woods Media Productions, Inc. / The Bunny and the
Crocodile Press, 1996
The original transmutation notebooks were those in which Charles Darwin
worked out his ideas about natural selection, about the transmutation of
species, and are one of the sources for The Transmutation
Notebooks. Becker has taken them, Darwin's published writings and
journals, and his letters and those of his wife and cousin Emma née
Wedgewood, and re-assembled their fragments into a series of connected poems which, in sequence, tell the story of their
life and thought; all are related in the first person by either Charles or
Emma, except for the last, a posthumous epilogue spoken by their oldest
daughter. Evan Connell did something similar in Notes from a Bottle
Found on the Beach at Carmel and Points for a Compass Rose,
but unlike Connell Becker is telling a single, clear and coherent story, and
the basic material itself is more unified --- more like building up a sculpture
by adding pieces of modelling clay than Connell's vast assemblages of found
objects. It is a small sculpture, almost on a bonsai scale, but a realistic,
detailed one for all that, with two recognizable and individuated characters
set in a world which is itself full of small details --- Fuegan clothing, coral
atolls, the delicate parts of barnacles, Galapagos (one of the high points of
the poem), growing children, scholarly disputes, love, aging, bereavement.
(Perhaps a better figure would be that of those supreme artists-in-the-small,
the Mughal miniaturists.)
This is not superb poetry, the sort which demands to be memorized and read
aloud and makes the small hairs at the back of the neck stand on end, nor is it
profound (except, perhaps, for those who have never encountered Darwinism
before). But it vivid and moving in the appropriate places, well-wrought
throughout, and ultimately highly satisfying.
99 pp.
Evolution /
Poetry
Currently in print as a paperback, ~US$12, ISBN 0-938572-12-1
7--8 August 1997