“Restive Places at the End of Time”: A Review of Matthew Tierney’s Probably Inevitable
Though I staked my claim to writing at a young age, my Dad advocated a grounding in the sciences as a means to foster rationality and method. Unlike most teenagers, I was eager to please, so I signed up for chemistry, algebra, geometry, and calculus, which perhaps also showed an early predilection for suffering. Had I not been mortified by derivatives and imaginary numbers fifteen years ago, the title of Matthew Tierney’s third volume of poetry, Probably Inevitable, wouldn’t have recalled graphing a horizontal asymptote on blue-lined paper. To save you the trouble of Googling it, an asymptote is, essentially, a line that continuously approaches a given curve but does not intersect with it. It was a pleasure to draw the tiny arms of the x and y axis with my Steadtler mechanical pencil, and the curved sloping line representing a function that never hits zero as x approaches infinity.
Probably Inevitable expresses Tierney’s views on time, human evolution and certainty. Like the graph of a limit at infinity, modern culture, human relationships and even one’s run of luck appear to slope gradually toward meaninglessness, yet they never reach the lines drawn in our imaginations. We might be reasonably certain about the trajectory of our lives, but the predicted outcome is not assured. That outcome depends on what we’ve inherited, another significant concern of Tierney’s work. Probably Inevitable expresses a kind of limited optimism about our futures, a hedging of bets.
The laws of thermodynamics, Einstein’s theories, Quantum mechanics, Planck’s constant, and gravity are engrossing enough topics to hijack any poet’s attention. Instead, Tierney employs this subject matter to explore questions about how we arrived at this place in time, with these particular antecedents, relationships, recollections, habits and histories. In so doing, he avoids the tendency of other science poets, whose work, as Michael Lista asserted in his recent review, “for all its conceptual savvy, all too often feels bereft of feeling.” That certainly is not the case in a poem such as “Speed Dating in the Milky Way,” wherein the speaker’s fraught attitude toward the passage of time dovetails with his feelings toward our current obsession with efficiency, even in matters of the heart. Time and space in a Tierney poem are allusive and endlessly qualitative: the universe is “clockwork,” space is “Euclidean,” a “Planck time interval” is “paper-thin” and our solar system is “stubbornly self-centred.” Tierney describes abstract concepts with domestic and familiar characteristics, imbuing them with poignancy, and at times, with pain.
This discomfiture is an unavoidable consequence of treating the poem as a “time machine,” a suggestion that Tierney made in his essay for The New Quarterly and Arc Poetry Magazine’s joint double issue on science. In it, he proposes viewing time as knowledge, and the poem as “smashed time.” He also outlines the work of renowned physicist Julian Barbour, whose 2008 book The End of Time: The Next Revolution of Physics gave rise to the long poem “That Stratospheric Streak My Green Filament” at the core of Probably Inevitable. Barbour claims that motion is merely illusion, and that an unchanging configuration of things makes up the entirety of the universe. We can think of each instant as a “time capsule” rich with the physical manifestations of our unique past, such as fossils and genes, records that exist in the present as we do. We’re biased toward the idea of a linear history, but does this bias exist in nature?
Barbour’s theories set off Tierney’s preoccupation with chronology. Poems compulsively inspect and catalogue the scattered fragments of his memories, pop culture, human history, and geology, as if trying to prove that “the finer we measure the present, the wilder/ our stab at the future.” The juxtaposition of profundities with the mundane and quotidian details of modern life renders the poems more emotionally resonant. YouTube videos, fairytales, comic books, pieces of music and beloved albums– reading these poems is like shuffling a lifetime’s worth of memories on an iPod, a collection of cultural moments in which the speaker finds himself reflected. “Too much?” the speaker asks, answering affirmatively:
[tab60]Too[/tab60] much. General—no, blanket contrition, for a string [tab10]of acts of omission that imagination has scared[/tab10] into memory. Experience is elusive; to identify [tab10]pain as phantom spares you none of its throb.[/tab10]
Phantoms and the missing parts of ourselves are also imagined in “That Stratospheric Streak My Green Filament,” a sequence investigating Barbour’s notion that time does not exist. Many poems in Probably Inevitable deal with the consequences of this possibility, but “That Stratospheric Streak …” specifically confronts the fallout of time’s absence on the poet’s bright and jumbled recollections of childhood and past loves: “the initial ordered state creates history:/ pell-mell drifts down, vibrations in air become sound.”
A sense of loss pervades this long poem, because while he attempts to orient himself, there is also a letting-go. The speaker attempts to relinquish the desire to view his life in sequential order, to prioritize one event over another, and to organize time around a pivot or focal point. In the poem’s first section, the possibility of reconciling time is stalked like prey through the seasons, and Tierney reveals, “I halt and take in how loud, clumsy, unmistakable I’ve been./ Wherever I am now/ becomes in retrospect my yellow sun.” Repeatedly, the speaker acknowledges his lack of centre, evoking spectres of Yeats’ wandering falcon. Yet despite the seemingly incoherent disorder of “these days without sequence,” the speaker can “make out clearly the space-time grid/ around the child in the playground.” Tierney embeds passages of The End of Time throughout the poem, exploring Barbour’s theory that records are all we have. How does this bear upon nuclear families or a series of exes? Even when there’s “no love left … time spent together is imprinted,/a fossil with clear antecedents.”
Probably Inevitable ’s later sections continue to ponder how the absence of time bears upon our day-to-day lives, but these poems have a more conversational tone:
You ask how it all started and I belt out ‘Dunno’ with the certainty of a bass doo-wopping the close. You insist, so here it goes: 13.7 billion years ago, before she blows, the universe is a restive place.
With its barrage of references and densely-packed imagery, Tierney’s diction will hold some readers at a distance. Indeed, the technology-steeped language and Tierney’s fluid ease with concepts from a wide range of disciplines, combined with his clipped imperatives and bantering tone, can be daunting. It’s important to push through the fragmented style to the humour and playfulness of the poems. They display a delight in contrasting the grandiosity of scientific terminology with the ordinariness of eating breakfast, going golfing, taking a family vacation. There is a truly exuberant pleasure in language expressed in metaphors such as “tumbleweeds of O2,” “counterfactuals pile up like cornflakes pile up/like models of megamolecules” and “galaxies fanning out like patches of demin.” Tierney finds time, space, matter, particles and the processes that form life on Earth endlessly diverting and chaotic. He, or his poet-persona, would be the ideal party guest, someone who could explain different kinds of infinity over a few pilsners in a way that you’d be sure to remember. The poems try to share their delight and absurdity, and perhaps we’re encouraged not to take things too seriously, but to find “a joy not possible/ before the big bang made creation some sweet place.”
Since thematically the book grapples with plot and linearity, the leaps and linguistic swivels may be justified in that the style manifests the subject matter. The sharp, meandering thoughts reflect the speaker’s questioning of a single, overarching version or narrative. By the fourth and final section, Tierney’s poetic voice hits its stride, even while turning the most prosaic of events and settings into song. The poems of this section have a stronger momentum, with a greater quantity of flexing, electrifying lines, like “Photons bank off the window frame, fool no one,/ mere minutes on a zip line from the sun,” or, “Most fantasy is born of tragedy,/ most death in the wild from worn-out teeth,/ fossils painstakingly tooth-brushed.” Like his contemporaries, poets Jeramy Dodds and Kevin Connolly, who gave their feedback on this manuscript, Tierney has a fondness for evasiveness and for the double-entendre. Titles give clues about the wordplay contained in the poems: “Size Extra Medium,” “Addressing Human Resources,” “International Date Line” and “Primed for Contact.”
Tierney’s fascination with subculture and contemporary phenomena may prompt some to read his poems with smartphones in hand, Wikipedia bookmarked. I don’t believe it’s always necessary to look up film titles and breakfast foods and proper names, because with the array of associations, the poet’s aim is to locate himself within a moment of time. It’s a moment that has a tinge of Gen X, existential malaise and cautious optimism, yet also of creativity and innovation. It’s the first generation to understand the reach of the Internet and social media, while managing to maintain its individuality in relation to it. Yet this cultural moment is not meant to be relatable to all audiences or readers; writers of my generation, the one immediately following, wouldn’t claim that “all art aspires to the well-crafted pop song,” even with Tierney’s wry, tongue-in-cheek spirit. Tierney culls the time capsules of the past for revelations on how we developed–biologically, politically, spiritually, romantically, and so on–and how we arrived at our cherished assumptions. Yet at the same time, his time capsule is uniquely his own.
Finally, we may gather the accumulated knowledge of previous generations, collect materials, and brush the dust off, but there may not be room for all of this in our minds. “Who’s capable of holding but a fraction,/even less long-term?” Letting go and forgetting seem just as vital as learning and accumulating. How did we get to this place, the poems seem to ask, even to accuse us; how did we evolve into what we are? “Everyone has a different take,” Tierney admits, though at the same time, “We fail together.” For all probing into genetics and physics, the poems suggest that we still do not grasp the most simple mysteries of time’s arrow, or how to answer the question that bears on all of us: “what comes next?”
