Neil Aitken’s new chapbook Leviathan (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2016) guides the reader through the life, loves, and losses of Charles Babbage, a nineteenth-century mathematician and inventor remembered as the father of the computer. The poems trace the milestones of his life, and after his death, Babbage is eulogized by his great creation, his Leviathan. Aitken’s collection illuminates the heartbreak of ambition when it outsizes one lifetime.

The poem “Void” might best exemplify the aim of this collection. By combining quotes from Babbage’s book On the Economy of Machines and Manufactures with Aitken’s words, we get a glimpse at Babbage’s methodical mind, while the poem’s formal considerations echo the fact that Babbage’s work will be cut short yet built on for decades to come. Aitken writes:

yet in regard to two
 // in the silent fist of memory, each

of the sources of this power— // flows through the invisible lines

the force of wind and water, // jangling our chains, lifting our wooden limbs

—we merely make use of bodies // animated by living fire, an ocean of regret

in a state of motion // we cannot return from, cannot cross

Throughout the collection, Aitken returns to the idea of love, both romantic and in the vein of a life’s work. Aitken begins on this theme with the chapbook’s second poem, “Babbage in Love, 1811”:

The room suddenly full of celestial motion, the tables brimming with error,

and your hand in hers seems at last so improbable, an unsolvable mystery.

Nothing has prepared you for this moment. Not a childhood spent

summoning the devil into salted circles to ask unanswerable questions.

Not the hours of rowing a skiff across an empty lake at dawn, the arc

of the waves echoing the early light. So many fields of labor, pointless here.

You, as unsteady, as uncertain as you were in youth, a teenage boy with boards

strapped to your feet, trying to walk on water, trying not to drown.

Later, Aitken writes of Babbage’s first encounter with Ada Lovelace and the connection and kinship he feels for her. Through these poems, Aitken complicates the losses that mark Babbage’s professional life by reminding us this historical figure with a penchant for philosophy and dreaming was also driven by human desires: the need to love and be loved.

While Aitken’s Babbage in “Babbage, Circumnavigating the Room, Encounters Ada, 1833” marvels at how Lovelace seems to see the world in the secret way he does, he also recognizes that life can be one of exceptional loneliness:

Julianna DeMicco is a senior at Binghamton University. She is currently pursuing a double major in philosophy, politics and law, and English with a concentration in creative writing and global cultures. She is a student leader on her campus and has focused her experiences on a service-based learning mentality. As a vocalist, trumpeter, ukulele player, and poet, she is fascinated by the musicality of poetry and loves to experiment with different rhythms in her own work. In her spare time, she furthers her independent study of Italian, French, and Chinese. In addition, she is pursuing a study of poetry and literature from different eras, specifically the Medieval Era to the Early Renaissance.