
Ada Unseen
Frances Presley(Author)
Shearsman Books (Publisher)
Published on 12. March 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
120 pages
978-1-84861-663-9 (ISBN)
Description
`Mathematical Science is the language of the unseen relations between things', wrote Ada Lovelace, mathematician and computer visionary. She had a home on Exmoor and this landscape is reimagined through a combination of science and poetics, also part of a collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading, ADADA:landescape. Ada loved birds, especially song birds, and studied the theory of flight. In a series of poems about birds and flight some are designed like punch cards to isolate key words and create an alternative text for a woman's life. The third sequence explores, through a 21st century lens, various aspects of the 'unseen' which were of interest to Ada: these include the human body, computing, music, the imaginary, and dark matter. There is also an internet cut up and paste on the word `Ada' and copious notes.
In Frances Presley's new exhilarating and intellectually stimulating collection, the life and work of Ada Lovelace - innovator in the science of computing, but also lover of birds and music - is both focus and trigger. The concepts of the seen and the unseen in science, poetry and social mores permeate this volume, including contemporary society's blindness to ecological destruction and the historical suppression of women. Creative tensions between the closed and open, the algorithmic and the intuitive, science and nature weave their way deftly through the book in a profusion of evocative and often witty allusions to birds, flight, landscape, architecture, computation and mathematics. Through ambiguous voices, shifts in time and location, quotation, word play, cut and paste, visual patterns and accompanying documentation, Presley gifts us a rousing, profound and multilayered poetic sequence.
In Frances Presley's new exhilarating and intellectually stimulating collection, the life and work of Ada Lovelace - innovator in the science of computing, but also lover of birds and music - is both focus and trigger. The concepts of the seen and the unseen in science, poetry and social mores permeate this volume, including contemporary society's blindness to ecological destruction and the historical suppression of women. Creative tensions between the closed and open, the algorithmic and the intuitive, science and nature weave their way deftly through the book in a profusion of evocative and often witty allusions to birds, flight, landscape, architecture, computation and mathematics. Through ambiguous voices, shifts in time and location, quotation, word play, cut and paste, visual patterns and accompanying documentation, Presley gifts us a rousing, profound and multilayered poetic sequence.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Exeter
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
181 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84861-663-9 (9781848616639)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Frances Presley was born in Derbyshire in 1952, and grew up in Lincolnshire and Somerset. She now lives and works in London. Publications of poems and prose include The Sex of Art, Hula Hoop and Linocut. She collaborated with artist Irma Irsara, in a multi-media performance about the fashion trade in London, Automatic Cross Stitch; and with Elizabeth James in an email text and performance, Neither the One Nor the Other. Somerset Letters (Oasis Books, 2002), with drawings by Ian Robinson, explored intersections of community and landscape. The title sequence of Paravane: new and selected poems, 1996-2003 is a response to 9/11. Myne: new and selected poems and prose, 1976-2006 includes two landscape sequences: the most recent is `Stone settings', an approach to the Neolithic sites on Exmoor, which is also a collaboration and multi-media performance with Tilla Brading. This reappears with further new work in her 2009 collection, Lines of sight. Sine that book, Frances Presley has published Halse for hazel. She has also co-translated the work of the Norwegian poets Hanne Bramness (Salt on the eye) and Lars Amund Vaage (Outside the Institution. Selected Poems).