Standard Deviation
Horace Bode
Bubble Press, £8.99.

Can a mathematician be a poet? Are not the two mutually exclusive?

The boffin busies himself with the rational world: what can be defined, discovered and rendered real. The poet, however, deals with the intransigent: what cannot be fully understood, what will always evade description and what can never be perfect. The mathematician registers a victory when he proves something to be true and the poet when he is further along the path to crystallising an emotion.

Yet there are overlaps between the two disciplines. The technicality involved in building a terza rima or sonnet requires a rationalisation of line, rhythm and stress that few art forms outside of music necessitate. And is there a more creative action than producing a theory or a hypothesis that one has to then demonstrate or disprove? Science, one could argue, puts the imagination to the test in a far more stringent fashion than a coterie of literature critics.

There is a small, but established, group of poets in this league such as Hungarian Miroslav Holub and armless Danish algebra-obsessive Porcine Batistuta. With this re-issue of the key poems of late UK-born Horace Bode, who worked as a mathematics lecturer at the University of East Leicester, Bubble Press intends to introduce our own home-grown maths geek into high society.

A bachelor and a nervous, diffident soul, Bode spent his entire life alone. In 'Prime of my Life', from his first collection One True Love (1938), he compares himself to a prime number, in which few other numbers can multiply themselves. This ends in the famous and pitying lament:

Only one can find its way into me
And the more years I become
The further away she seems to be

Numbers take the place of people in his work: a consistent allegory throughout this collection that is, at once, beautiful and disturbing. Bode wrote a poem about how, when giving a lecture, a group of numbers conspire against him, like mischievous little sprites. While he turns his back to the blackboard, the numbers jump free from his equation and hide behind the overhead projector, before leaping back into the equation at the wrong place.

Anyone that lectures to bored students must have also experienced the same kind of trauma. Fleeing his lesson prematurely, Bode returns home and finds another number in his trouser pocket, and yet another clogging up his pipe. He bursts into tears; the numbers, now realising the pain they have inflicted upon the person that brought them into life, begin to comfort him. This work ends with the poet lecturing the numbers about what he has failed to tell his students.

Kant was an equation.
Marx was an equation
Smith was an equation
Einstein an equation
But while they
Were simple
We, the sum of their
Equations, are
Complex and deep,
Beset by brackets
Subsets and square
Roots more prone
To error and despair

Standard Deviation is the definitive collection of Bode's output, and clocks a mere 180 pages. Richly textured and layered, this is verse that, although standing outside the main course of 20th century poetry, manages to plough its furrow with a confidence and individual bravado, but not a great degree of depth.

Bode was born into numbers. His father was a Herefordshire-based accountant, while his mother was a diffident and frugal housewife. He was an only child, and his background seems to be marked only by consistent tedium, brought to some kind of excitement briefly by the discovery that he was asthmatic.

Missing the First World War and too ill for the second, Bode continued his physics lecturing for over fifty years, before retiring, aged seventy, to his old family house in Hereford, where he died of a heart attack on the second day of his retirement in 1986.

However, there was one moment when Bode's life looked as though it could transform under the wisdom of intimacy. In the late 1960s, he received a letter from a young male English graduate, who intended to undertake his PHD upon the 52-year-old poet.

Strapping, smart and with a keen knowledge of both letters and numbers, the young man visited Bode on many occasions, where the two sparked up a close friendship that saw the graduate staying at his weekend cottage on a number of occasions.

This long and unconsummated affair is here recounted in 'Trust', one of the few poems that does not contain a numerical theme:

We sat up all night
listening to Motown
And as you made to leave
I would not let you go now
But I must allow you to go
Knowing the now would remain
An ever-present friend.

The young man eventually failed to get funding for his work, and instead became a leading editor of books that introduced people to contemporary verse. But rumour has it that he abandoned the subject of this thesis due to the poet's insistence on weekly visits, and the long, tiresome letters of adoration.

However, after six months of constant pursuit, the letters and phone-calls suddenly stopped. Bode charts this process in the revealing work that pinpoints the exact moment where Bode's desire dies, or his rational self takes hold, 'Elegy for Zero'.

Where you see the hills green and lush
Render nature absolute
I see red contours twist and crush
As though they cannot
Take the intensity
Of their altitude

It is the same feeling that when
I pass you another glass of wine
You say the same refrain
That darkened yesterday:
"Oh professor, sir
I am not in the mood."

This marks the end of Bode's most colourful and engaging output. Increasingly private and introvert, Bode's work then became, in some critics' eyes, a parody of his earlier successes; in others, an increasing reluctance to actually use letters themselves.

During this period, he created, maybe, the only poem made entirely of numbers and mathematical symbols. 'The Honourable Thing' charts a love story, as one man (1) falls in love with a woman (2) and, as he wins her (3), she leaves him for another (4), who makes her pregnant. As she gives birth (6), her lover leaves and her original boyfriend returns to her.

1      2
1            2
1      2
1+2
=3

3                  4
3            4
3      4

(4 – 3 = 1)
(4 x 2 = 8)

4+8    1
4+8          1
4+8                1
4+8          1
4+8    1

8-2      1
= 6      1
2-6      1
= 4      1
2+6      1     4
2 + 6      1            4
2+6+1                  4

The poetic elite criticised Bode for his obsession with atypical romantic ideas and, at the same time, his inability to use science to give sentimentality anything more than a rational gloss – la cliché des mathematiques, as noted Frenchman of letters Enrico del Mulder.

Nevertheless, I believe 'The Honourable Thing' is an important footnote in the development of modernist poetry, but it is only a footnote – yet, as a footnote falls at the service of a number, Bode would surely have no objections to this status.