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On “Conductive wings” So, with Atom, here’s a chapbook that evoked for me the genre’s rich and long history, yet is utterly post-modern, wrestling as it does with ‚depression, desperation, dysfunction, and the sense of impotence against the oppression of time, nature, society and inescapable ignorance,‛ to borrow poet and contributor Scott Owens’ words, the TCE reader who recommended Atom be reviewed. I might add that there’s a bitter aftertaste in a few of the poems, which makes it apropos to this issue’s theme. Carty’s device for exploring the Sisyphean human endeavor — with love at its center — is the Periodic Table. We humans are, after all, a package of chemical compounds comprised of elements. What began with ‚Oxygen is Obvious,‛ she’d hoped would turn into ‚a poem for each element on the Periodic Table, and she wrote ‚100 or so poems‛ using the Table’s elements as touchstones. As noted above, a complete set of Periodic Table poems didn’t pan out, but there are plenty enough in Atom to make the device a cohesive umbrella in which to experiment with the chemistry of love. In this case, love as expressed between Carty’s illustrative characters, Atom and Zoe. Some poems adhere tightly to their ruling element as in ‚Atom’s Definition of Copper.‛ Spoken in Atom’s voice, the poem follows a dictionary’s format, moving in its three stanzas from ‚Noun,‛ to ‚Verb‛ to ‚Adj.‛ But the surprise comes in the departure from a straightforward dictionary entry in Atom’s third noun definition where he says: I’d like to shape a butterfly of copper. Maybe a string of butterflies made from copper wiring. Conductive wings.
The ‚malleable metallic‛ Cu is transformed and we look at the copper bottoms of our cooking pots in a whole new way. Atom, striving to rise above the human condition, tries his hand at art. Alas, there is no escaping the destiny of our mortal electrons, especially in love, as Carty makes clear in ‚Covalent Bonds,‛ a poem inspired by chromium (element 24, Cr). It’s Atom’s and Zoe’s wedding night. Set in two columns, which can be read both down and across, mimicking the couple’s togetherness-but-ultimate-individuality, the poem ends: It’s what Chromium does
Hung with red curtains
When it shares
Over windows
Pairs of electrons
Separated into panes
Between atoms