As the title suggests, the poetry uses science as metaphor. It explores the intersection between science and life, quantum theory and love, molecules and gamma rays and despair and betrayal. Ball uses the language of science to peel off the layers of emotional complexity that all of us possess and encounter everyday. It is exhilirating, if occasionally difficult to translate and understand. But this occasional opacity is balanced against poems of clarity, epiphany and stark existential awareness. 

The book is composed of three sections: Black Dog and Other Enigmas; The Crucible; and Only Rock and Roll. The first has a melancholic air, exploring the feelings around depression, despair, ageing, illness. Ball’s use of language is often exquisite: in ‘Omphalos’ she writes ‘illness creeps/precision fog across the brow’; in ‘Impact Enigma’, ‘It’s an endless drive/down Sisyphus highway’; and ‘ordinary matter/stretches to a spaghetti of longing’ in ‘Echo of the Big Bang’.

The Crucible poems focus around the natural world, animals and plants. ‘Pastoral’ for example, describes the onset of spring, and the agelessness of Nature in comparison to humans (‘This forest is older than your woe’), and Ball writes simply but beautifully (‘gnash and wail silenced/against aviary orchestra’). The title poem ‘Repulsion Thrust’ I read as a mother speaking to her child while that child thrashes about in rebellion against his or her parents, explaining that the anger ‘isn’t yours really/it’s mine/my mother’s, your father’s/you get the idea/genetic instructions/writ in your/knit brows’. And that the child must ‘use it/thrust through the repulsion/turn it to love/what else is there?’ I wonder if Ball is gently prodding the reader to think about the cliché of ‘love conquers all’, while at the same time remembering that love is something few of us can live without.

Her poem ‘Immortal Worm’ reads like a challenge to futurists and their quest for human life extension, as does ‘Technological Singularity’ with its description of the supremely intelligent being that has resulted from technological innovation. ‘In the smoking depth/of my envy’ Ball writes, as the ‘ancient relic of flawed humanity’, the human finds the thing that the supremely intelligent being does not have, ‘that delicate shake of emotion/you’ve evolved away’. Which may go part way to explaining that, while love may not conquer all except in fairy tales, it is the human quality unreproducable in machines. This tension between science and humanity is woven throughout Repulsion Thrust.

One of the most impressive, insightful and beautifully written of Ball’s poems is ‘The Immeasurable Sea and the Boundless Earth’. In this she writes of a ‘life spent mapping/dizzy with knowledge and misunderstanding’. Here can be read the folly of humans seeking riches from the earth and sea, ‘digging dirty fingernails/against pica hunger’, but also the individual constantly seeking to assuage desire, knowing and not knowing that it is an impossible quest.

There is more humour in the third section, Only Rock and Roll, as well as a continuation of word play, but it ends with sombre note indeed in ‘Blackout’. ‘Six Flavours of Quark’ contains the irresistible idea of comparing quarks to Italian ices; Ball tells the reader in a footnote that quarks do, in fact, come in ‘6 flavours or species’. Despite the last poem’s bleakness, which is nevertheless bracing and appropriate – ‘it only takes the flick of the switch/and we’re stuffed’ – Ball balances the threat with gentleness and hope in ‘Love in the 21st Century’. Here she compares married, parental life, its quiet sweetness and inbuilt looking to the future, with ‘For some of us, the desert is already here/optimism nigh on impossible/and happiness totally uncalled for’.

A bracing, imaginative collection of poetry that rewards repeated reading.

Repulsion Thrust

2009

by Magdalena Ball

Bewrite Books

ISBN: 9781906609306

112pp