Celestial Mechanics

A journey through heaven and earth for the questing mind. Navigating from the clockwork music of the spheres to the “melismatic celebration of disaster” that is the blues, these are poems that map the places where orderly cosmic harmony and dissonance converge. “If only the world were as orderly as Bach, if there were no need for gospel, no need for jazz, no need for the blues.” As Anthony Walton writes, centuries ago, Johannes Kepler observed that the universe was a form of music. Walton now expands Kepler’s vision to include the music of our lives. He explores how artists such as Thelonious Monk—born into an America South of “disorder and chaos” made new rules based on African American forms and sounds. As Walton writes of Monk and bebop jazz: It made me understand that there was more to music than resolution, that there were other sorts of beauty. That beauty could be pain, and balm could be fit to the jagged shadows of my experience. This collection offers indelible studies of musical icons: the “whiskey voice” of Etta James, Glenn Gould as “a cosmologist,” Louis Armstrong, “masked in a smile so bright it had to be a grimace,” Miles Davis, “one blue note at a time.” Throughout, Walton finds cosmic truths in the grit of everyday life—from the third shift on a loading dock to the “dank nubbed platform” of a New York City subway. And there are equally startling moments of clarity when personal, intimate truths are found in physics and the cosmos. Whether his subject is Sir Isaac Newton or street traffic, Walton is always surprising, with humanity and passion in every line. Celestial Mechanics is more than a book of poetry; it is an “Ars Poetica” for the heart.