Hoge, Bradley Earle, The Drake Equation, Vraeyda Media, 2022, 72 pp. $15.99. https://www.amazon.com/Drake-Equation-Brad-Hoge/dp/198803440X
A Review by Sandra J. Lindow
Bradley Earle Hoge’s The Drake Equation consists of 52 science-related poems about half of them previously published. Hoge’s life work has been as a science teacher and environmental educator. Thus, ekphrastic poems, inspired by paintings viewed at museum exhibits, reflect how looking at art through a scientific lens can provide deeper insight into history, changing environments, and the artistic process. The book consists of four sections: “Portals,” “Constellations,” “Relativity,” and “A Dog Contemplating a Stoplight.”
The Drake Equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. Created by astronomer Frank Drake in 1961, it was intended to generate discussion at the first conference on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the universe (SETI). Hoge’s eponymous poem, is constructed to mimic the shape of our galaxy, It compares the search for intelligence to walking through a neighborhood at night seeing “headlights and taillights” as stars and noting which neighbors leave lights on, a symbolically lonely search.
The first section, “Portals” explores how art and visual experience can provide portals to the scientific imagination. Through science, art can be seen differently; for instance, Hoge’s visit to the Tate Gallery in London provides insight into quantum theory. Viewing Richard Long’s’ Cornish Slate Line is likened to the classic “Double Slit Experiment” which reveals how light can simultaneously exist as both waves and particles;
In the Tate Gallery display,
they lead through a portal
— across slatefloor. Walls of stone
rising on either side to ionic columns
holding the passage open.
Where the light shines, is fracturing.
Where darkness is allowed,
the smooth curvature of space-time.
Did Long intend to guide us
into the light or into darkness?
If we project light, we follow chaos.
Suggesting a connection between light and chaos is surprising (We usually see light as clarity.), but second thought reveals the underlying idea that at a quantum level of experience, nothing is certain except unexpected change. “Red Shift” wonders “How long is left/ before entropy drains the universe of color/ and renders the canvas blank?” It concludes with this evocative stanza:
Simplest at the beginning—singularity—
simple again at the end—complete
entropy. Connected by lines of time.
Complexity, and color—fading into the future.
“Fog of Liquid Ink on Stone” begins by describing James McNeil Whistler’s, Nocturne: The Thames at Battersea: “City hazy in the background. / Water negative space. Lithotint /— impression of liquid ink on stone. // Blurry, as a child’s rubbing / charcoal over leaves.” Then provides scientific and political context “…. At a time when moths /turned black against sooty bark /and Malthusian angst roiled /intelligentsia. While the masses /labored on.” Negative space takes on a double meaning: The smudgy darkness reflecting air pollution. “Trail of Giants” muses on the inevitability of endings when viewing a giant redwood: “Torn from the ground by the only foe capable of out lasting the giants —gravity.’
The “Constellations” section moves into SF poems that speculate about future space exploration. “Proxima B” relates a palimpsest of unreadable colonist messages left on stones. “K2-18b” describes words falling from the sky like sunbeams. Throughout this section environmentalism is an essential value with powerful images of the damage humans can do to a once healthy ecosystem: Several poems, with “Gliese-581 e” a particular example, move quantum theory from the micro to the macro level, contemplating the role of the observer and the nature of consensual reality. “The Dragons of Titan” imagines a “flick of tail” propelling extraterrestrial dragons “through the cold liquid methane.”
The “Relativity” section begins with Le Guinish musings that compare the human perception of time with the possibilities of time travel and Einstein’s theory regarding how time functions. For instance, “Relativity of Simultaneity” considers the nature of aging: “Speeding up as we age/ and the percentage/ of a year approaches the limit/ of a lifetime. Not, as we now/ know, relative only to our speed/ within expanding universe/ accelerating due to dark energy.” Considering the global warming crisis, it is not surprising then that running out of time leads to poems that consider evolutionary biology and the history of extinction, ecological mini sermons where “litter thrown from an open window” is paired with “reactionary political candidates.” Set in the Mississippi delta, “A Tree Full of Cormorants” concludes evocatively: “debris catching on the trunk /as the current flows around it. / Its branches full of cormorants.”
The final section, “A Dog Contemplating a Stoplight,” contends that humans are not dogs contemplating stoplights, unaware of their meaning. Rather Hoge suggests that we should be able to see and stop doing the things that are destroying our once healthy ecology. He reinforces his environmental message with lines like: “Rivers of plastic flowing into / along the coastline/ from Alaska to the End of the Earth. / Brine and sun degrading debris/ into flocs mimicking phytoplankton. / Filling bellies of fish and birds.” For most of us Hoge is preaching to the choir, but perhaps these poems will encourage us to be more vigilant in what we purchase and then discard. Recommended.
Sandra Lindow has served as Vice President and Acting President of SFPA. Her poetry has been seen in various markets including Asimov’s, Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Dwarf Stars, and the Rhysling Anthologies. Her spec related editing includes Dwarf Stars, Eye to the Telescope, and most recently the Rhysling winners anthology, Alchemy of Stars II. She lives on a hilltop in Menomonie, Wisconsin where she waits out the pandemic and attempts various strategies to keep varmints from eating her vegetables and perennials.
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