A Poet in The Cosmos

One of Dartmouth's most prolific poets, Middlebury College Professor Robert Pack '51, has just published a selection from five of his last books, nearly all of them poetic explorations of the scientific universe. Pack "revitalizes" the "ancient union" of art and science, says biologist Stephen Jay Gould in a jacket blurb. And indeed, the poems in this volume are a strange and sometimes wonderful mix of the scientific chase and the poetic heart. The book contains 27 new poems, including an ode to drunken turkeys ("...their eyes/ blazed with amazing knowledge that transported them,/ within their bodies, into paradise."—from"Wild Turkeys in Paradise"), and some wry philosophizing about growing old ("Strange pleasure now/ to think back fifty years and know/ that suffering, when safely in th e past, is good.from "South Bronx,1939"). As with all his recent work, Pack combines the intensely personal with thoughts about the cosmos, and mixes humor with nature's constant pathos.

The book, Fathering theMap, is published by the University of Chicago.