Book Review: The Darwin Poems by Emily Ballou

Though structured and presented as a kind of biography, The Darwin Poems isn’t really a biography in the traditional sense. For one thing, there’s a lot in it that is imagined, and Emily Ballou makes that very clear. But she also takes great care to incorporate Charles Darwin’s own ‘verse’ or journal entries and letters (poetic it is too), and there’s a deep veracity to this work that makes the reader feel like this is not only as clear-sighted a perspective on Darwin as any formal, prosaic biography, but also one which goes deeper, helping us to understand Darwin as child, lover, father, friend, on the most intimate of levels. So well written and insightful is this book, that verse now seems the most natural and obvious form for biography. The progression is fast paced, and it’s a delightful struggle for the reader to move slowly enough to savour each rich and densely-packed line of carefully constructed poetry, while wanting to follow fast along the biological line from birth to death.

The book is divided into seven chronological sections with 73 poems in all. The first of the sections charts Darwin’s early life from childhood to the Cambridge years. Other sections explore Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle, his marriage and years at Down House, parenthood and the loss of his daughter Annie, his own illness, the development of his great works, and the later years. Each section begins with a direct quote from Darwin’s notebooks or letters. While many historical books are driven by the large scale actions of its heroes, Ballou’s Darwin is developed, as Darwin’s own theories were, through close observation of detail. Despite the inclusion of Darwin’s own words, this is a very feminine portrait of Darwin, discovery occurring in the smallest, most intimate pockets of life.

Most of the poems take on a single reference point: generally some critical moment that had a formative effect on Darwin. Take, for example, the very first poem in the book, which begins a month after his mother’s death, when Darwin was eight years old:

No amount of plunder
no collected cache of wonders could extract
the adoration he now needed
to chase away the terrible secret
growing daily within him:
the thought
that either his father was no doctor
or God was a donkey. (“The Donkey, August 1817”)

Not only does the poem trace the first moment of religious doubt brought on by a death that would later be mirrored by the death of Darwin’s daughter Annie, but couples the emotion with an evocative, sensual sense of the texture of the natural world: “black beetle carapaces, crumbling butterfly wings, pads of moss, / quartz-cored rocks/he smashed open on fence posts”. This poem made me think of Joyce’s “ineluctable modality of the audible”, with its secret naturalist thrill underlying the intense sadness and confusion.

Article Author: Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of Sleep Before Evening, The Art of Assessment, Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Cherished Pulse and She Wore Emerald Then. …

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