The Northern Irish poet Jean Bleakney studied biochemistry at Queen’s University Belfast and started writing poetry after the birth of her first child. With her strictly scientific academic background, she stands somewhat apart from her contemporaries, although, as she points out, science and poetry overlap in many ways: “both interrogate, and the processes are not dissimilar”. What Elizabeth Bishop said about writing a poem (“it’s a mystery, then a surprise, then a lot of hard work”) is also, says Bleakney, true of science. Bleakney particularly admires Bishop for her fastidious visual and linguistic accuracy, and is sometimes impatient with poets who don’t get their facts right. In “Imitation: On looking into Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘On reading a Book on Common Wild Flowers’”, she asks, “were you having a go, Paddy / … was the book poorly illustrated? / Or was it viewed in the dim imperative of a Dublin snug?”
Bleakney’s sonnet “Deduction”, first published in the TLS in 2005 and then in ions (2011), an alphabetical series of meditations on abstract nouns, reads like a scientific discovery in real time. In the octet, various garden pests are eliminated as metaphors for the poet, until the eureka moment in line eight when the appropriately named leaf miner’s habit of burrowing between the “top and bottom sheets” of its host makes it the perfect candidate. We feel the poet’s excitement as she clinches the comparison (“yes”) that allows her to open up the image. In much the same way, the insect itself opens the “winding / blister of its own meanderings”. The experiment is a success: the poem is written.
Deduction
Not the whitefly, nor the vine weevil,
nor the mealy bug, nor the scale insect,
nor woolly aphid, nor other viviparous aphid,
nor spider mite, nor any sap-sucker per se
but rather, one senses, the leaf miner
– lover of lamellae and interstices;
burrower between the host leaf’s
top and bottom sheets – yes,
the leaf miner, with its green-tinted
soft-focus view of the garden;
engineer of the long and winding
blister of its own meanderings …
least among pests, the leaf miner is surely
the apprentice poet of the piece.
JEAN BLEAKNEY (2005)
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