Review of The Electron-Ghost Casino by Randolph Healy, pub. Miami University Press 2024

[sheenaghpugh]

“Without lacunae a ladder is just a plank” ("DU BOUT DE LA PENSEÉ")

The Electron-Ghost Casino has a preface, unusual in a poetry collection, which tells us:

“The title, “The Electron-Ghost Casino” refers to Rutherford’s gold foil experiment of 1911 showing that atoms are mainly empty space. If you took away the empty space, the entire population of the earth would fit in a teaspoon. Of course, you wouldn’t be able to lift it. (I should credit a student of mine, Logan Duff, who asked “Are we all then just electron ghosts?” when we were covering the topic.) The appearance of solidity when Samuel Johnson kicked a stone in a bid to refute immaterialism was due to his electron fields repelling those of the stone. The casino bit is a gloss on evolutionary processes, where most trials end in failure.”

I take this to mean, in non-technical terms, that life is chancy and that world is not only more various but less solid than we think. But it also demonstrates Healy’s background, again unusual for a poet, in maths and science. He uses vocabulary and concepts from these fields very familiarly, and not just in humorous squibs like

        When the sun hits your eye
        like the square root of pi
        that’s statistics
         (“Hold Your Breath For Global Warming”).

“Null Sex Lemma (for Walter Benjamin)” goes, in full:

I haven’t a hope of understanding that, so I can’t tell if it too is humorously intended. He certainly is a poet of a wry humour, as witness “Carbon Footprints”, where his father, an unwilling DIY-er, constructs a child’s bed:

          Each night when I made my bed
         I thought of him
         sometime around 3 a.m.
         when it collapsed again

I love this for its satirical take on the dutiful “family” poem prized by some editors, and indeed readers, which generally ends in a gush of sentiment about the late parent. I also liked “Hall of Near Fame”, with its tweaking of pop groups’ names that wasn’t quite as flippant as it looked:

        Steely Din
      The Righteous Bothers
      The Polite
      Sadness
      The Gee Gees

When, in “The Road To God Knows Where”, he describes a cacophonous performance,

      Take a cheese grater to your cortex
      or eavesdrop on the god of thunder kazooing Dumbo
      followed by the inter-county T-Rex throat-clearing competition

the humour is again in evidence, as is his liking for making words and images surprise, often by juxtaposing words that don’t on the face of it seem to have much to do with each other:

     Sheen a fin with oil
     A tall failed owl egg roaring
     Beaned arse loo
     Hard town dull redneck cooing
     (“Anthem”)

Sometimes this works for me; sometimes not.  With the scientific vocabulary, though it is unfamiliar, I can look it up. Also there are other ways in, for he is as apt to play with language as with science. The title “Solation” apparently means the liquefaction of a gel, but I saw it as “isolation without an I”, an interesting concept. What looks like random word association, though, is harder to fathom unless one happens to be inside the poet’s head. “Anthem” baffled me throughout; the Gaelic in the last verse no more puzzling than the English. On the other hand, “Exit Like A Frog In A Frost”, though I’m still not sure just what the images are doing, is haunting, as Rilke’s images sometimes are before the brain ever gets around to analysing them:

       there was a universe
       than which no sweeter
      could be imagined
      door after door slamming

       through a tumult pouring down
      from galleries
      of women and children in cages
      so utterly bewitching

      and the waters tumbled as stones
     and with lightning the stones were broken

One thing that intrigues me is the occasional word inversion, eg “tender skull-mounted orbs which next to nil assimilate” (“Minoan Miniatures”) and “But if we from natural processes result” (“The Road To God Knows Where”). This is such a no-no in contemporary poetry that it must be deliberate, but I haven’t worked out what he means it to do, unless it is another way of surprising the reader and putting him/her off balance. If so, it is quite a daring thing to do, as, arguably, it is for an Irish poet, post-Heaney, to write about bog bodies in “Outtakes”.

A standout poem, for me, was “Semper Ubique”, in which the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics becomes a poem even a technophobe like myself finds both moving and comprehensible (though in another universe I am presumably still scratching my head).

       I didn’t think I’d be so scared
      in light’s careless flux
      so many worlds conjured
      so that what can happen must.

     “What does it mean,” asked Aniela,
    “if ghosts so often appear
     surrounded by light
    or transparent, or headless, or white?”

     always and everywhere
    extravagant remote
    the girls’ skeleton hands
    resting
    where strings once stretched.

    (If only it were true
    that what should not happen could not.)