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The
Horse's Name Was Physics, Poems by George Drew
The
Horse’s Name Was Physics is a fascinating narrative sequence
about a pivotal moment in human history—the dawn of the nuclear
age. George Drew’s meticulously-drawn portrait of the work and lives
of the scientists is a rich blend of poetry, narrative, and research.
Sample Poems by George Drew
“George Drew weaves the story of twentieth-century physics together
with the lives of the people who helped make it and produces a compelling
vision. He uses finely-crafted poetry to recreate a world that will probably
continue to influence ours for as long as human beings exist. A remarkable
feat and a true treat for the mind and heart.”—Bruce Gregory,
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
“Amorphous, fact- and image-laden, for many years ‘the story
of modern physics’ has existed in the general atmosphere of my intellectual
life, categorized as one of the twentieth century’s major dramas.
Not until I read The Horse’s Name
Was Physics, did that drama come alive with passion and power wrought
by George Drew’s economical, graceful and richly nuanced work. The
story has moved from my intellect to my psyche, from a vague body of facts
and images to my imaginative core. Being able to give this gift to a reader
is, to borrow Wallace Stevens’ words, ‘the pure purpose of
the pure poet.’”—Gray Jacobik, Brave
Disguises
“In The Horse’s Name Was
Physics, George Drew has captured the high tragedy of the terrifying
human achievement in physics in the critical years between the two great
wars of the twentieth century, and he has done that in graceful poetry
(such as when he effectively casts a letter from Teller to Szilard as
a villanelle). A courageous undertaking, involving not only science but
also politics and history, and not only tragedy but also pathos and comedy
as they played into the lives of such leading performers as Einstein,
Heisenberg, and Oppenheimer, among others. A work to savor, to be read
and reread as poetry, as drama, and as history.”—Harry Staley,
All One Breath
“Surely, George Drew’s topic—the advent of the atomic
bomb—is a myth that came to life and is the stuff, inevitably, of
poetry. Drew’s book traces with great feeling, drama, and intelligence
the movement from speculations about matter to “The Journey of Death.”
It is a haunting progress as poetic imagination limns the awe-ful imagination
of nuclear physics and the scientists caught in the hell of history.”—Baron
Wormser, Subject Matter
George Drew was born in Mississippi and raised there and in New York State,
where he currently resides. Toads
in a Poisoned Tank, his first book, was published in 1986, and
a chapbook, So Many Bones (Poems
of Russia), in 1997 by a Russian press, in a bilingual edition. One of
his poems received an Honorable Mention in the Robert Frost Foundation’s
poetry competition, 2002, and another in the W.B. Yeats Society’s
competition, the same year. He was awarded a residency at the Vermont
Studio Center in 2004, and that summer he was a Guest Poet at The Frost
Place in Franconia, NH. He was the winner of the 2003 Paumanok Poetry
Award.
ISBN 1933456205, 80 pages