Matthew Tierney’s The Hayflick Limit opens with an excerpt from Joseph Brodsky’s winter eclogue, which in its 13 words raises at least as many questions: if each body "falls prey" to the telescope, is distance the hunter? Is proximity? Discovery? Is being preyed upon a relief from the indifference of time, death an acknowledgment of existence?
The Hayflick Limit
Et si notre existence était limitée par nos propres cellules ? The Hayflick Limit explore, en poésie, la frontière entre l’infini cosmique et l’infiniment petit, interrogeant notre place d’humains coincés entre science et absurdité.
Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry
To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years.
The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic - how the mind contains both - and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person?
Shifting focus between the limits of the telescope and the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney's second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time. With demotic verve and a humming line, he gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.
`The most thoroughly engaged and inventive book of poetry I have read in a long, long time. Brimming with hi-lo wit, keenly apprised and settled with cultured repose, Matthew Tierney takes The HayflickLimit to the hoop.' - David McGimpsey
`Matthew Tierney writes poems like a mad boy scientist. His lines manage to blur the border between nomenclature and everyday insight ... Call it science fiction for the melancholic.'
- Eye Weekly
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To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years.
The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic - how the mind contains both - and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person?
Shifting focus between the limits of the telescope and the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney's second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time. With demotic verve and a humming line, he gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.
`The most thoroughly engaged and inventive book of poetry I have read in a long, long time. Brimming with hi-lo wit, keenly apprised and settled with cultured repose, Matthew Tierney takes The HayflickLimit to the hoop.' - David McGimpsey
`Matthew Tierney writes poems like a mad boy scientist. His lines manage to blur the border between nomenclature and everyday insight ... Call it science fiction for the melancholic.'
- Eye Weekly
shield_question Foire aux questions
The Hayflick Limit offre une exploration poétique unique des limites humaines, entre biologie, physique et philosophie. Matthew Tierney y mêle humour, érudition et émotion, créant un dialogue entre l’infiniment grand et l’infiniment petit. Ce recueil, salué pour son inventivité, invite à réfléchir sur notre condition et notre rapport au savoir.
Le recueil aborde des thèmes aussi variés que la mortalité, les limites biologiques (via la théorie du Hayflick Limit), l’intelligence humaine et collective, la science et ses mystères, la peur et la cognition, ainsi que la culture populaire et ses paradoxes. Tierney y confronte aussi l’absurdité de l’existence à la rigueur scientifique.
Ce livre s’adresse aux amateurs de poésie contemporaine, aux esprits curieux des sciences et de la philosophie, ainsi qu’à ceux qui aiment les textes à la fois drôles, savants et mélancoliques. Il séduira aussi les lecteurs en quête d’une réflexion sur la condition humaine, entre rigueur et folie.
Vous pourrez interroger le smartbook sur les concepts scientifiques évoqués (comme le Hayflick Limit), les références culturelles et philosophiques, les choix poétiques de Tierney, ou encore les liens entre les poèmes et les thèmes de la mortalité, de l’intelligence ou de l’absurdité. Le smartbook peut aussi expliquer des vers ou des métaphores précises.
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Tierney accomplishes certain Albert Goldbarthian feats, weaving whiz-bang with philosophical insights that will break your heart. The Hayflick Limit features several phobia-poems: 'Aulophobia' (fear of flutes), 'Geliophobia' (fear of laughter), 'Lutraphobia' (fear of otters).
The most thoroughly engaged and inventive book of poetry I have read in a long, long time. Brimming with hi-lo wit, keenly apprised and settled with cultured repose, Matthew Tierney takes The Hayflick Limit to the hoop.
Matthew Tierney writes poems like a mad boy scientist. His lines manage to blur the border between nomenclature and everyday insight... Call it science fiction for the melancholic.
tag Mots-clés
poésie contemporaine
hayflick limit
matthew tierney
limites biologiques
mortalité
science et poésie
cosmos
infiniment petit
intelligence humaine
absurdité
culture populaire
peurs humaines
phobies
quantique
téléscope
microscope
recueil poétique
trillium book award
poésie canadienne
humour et science
mélancolie
connaissance
temps
cognition
warner bros
area 51
théories du tout
vincent price
molotov cocktail
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