Call Matthew Tierney a poet of entropy. Entropy describes how, over time, order moves toward disorder. It is the reason that ice cubes melt, balloons sag, and birthday cakes are eaten. In Probably Inevitable<\/i>, Tierney traces how things become messier and more complex over time\u2014not because we humans are weak and failing, but because that\u2019s the way the world works. Consider,<\/p>\n
Without time\u2019s invisible framework
\nI\u2019d never pool tomorrow in my hotel bed
\nlike heavy water, fazed by another night squandered
\nafter a charming number of imports, domestic premiums
\nthen sad Coors Lights.<\/p>\n
Yet as a framework, time is known only because things happen\u2014as in, \u201cTime\u2019s not the market, it\u2019s the bustle; not the price, but worth.\u201d To start to get at that worth, that bustle, Tierney repeatedly turns to the measurement of time, pointing out how constructed, random, or inadequate even our most rigorously scientific approaches to marking time can be. There are standard, almost banal, reflections on mid-life, such as, \u201cForty\u2019s the standard candle of physicals, \/ of earning power and sexual regret\u2026.\u201d There is the historical construction of time where, for example, \u201cJulius Caesar pads 45 AD with two extra months, carpe diem<\/i> by decree.\u201d And again, borrowing a very technical concept, nicely turned for sound and import, Tierney gives us, \u201cA Plank time interval \/ is so vapour-thin there\u2019s no before or after, \/ no report to follow the starter\u2019s pistol, \/ no revenge to bury Macbeth, no sketch artists.\u201d But of course his concern is primarily the experience of time, hearing the deafening crack of the pistol (a classic example of the move from order to disorder). Indeed, in the centerpiece of the collection, the accomplished \u201cThat Stratospheric Streak My Green Filament,\u201d Tierney takes up entropy directly when he writes, \u201cThe initial ordered state creates history: \/ pell-mell drifts down, vibrations in air make sound.\u201d It is a vision of attraction and repulsion, order and disorder at play, where all we are given is the certainty of change (\u201cWe\u2019ve no centre, \/ only sides to consider, moving towards or away from either\u201d). For Tierney, the fact that the current arrangement is only temporary doesn\u2019t cheapen it, but makes it all the more rare, valuable, full of promise, something conveyed in the lovely lines, \u201cIf it were necessary to tell someone where I am, \/ I\u2019d say the spheres of Kepler resonate like icicles, \/ I\u2019d say I have loved.\u201d These are poems full of vibrant and unexpected language, intelligence and (thankfully!) wit, produced by a poet whose response to change, to the unexpected, is to celebrate it by lending it form for however long that form may last.<\/p>\n
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