Ada Unseen - Presley, Frances

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Résumé :
Frances Presley was born in Derbyshire in 1952. Her many previous poetry collections include Paravane, Myne, Lines of sight and Halse for hazel. Her Collected Poems is in development....

Biographie:
Frances Presley was born in Derbyshire, grew up in Lincolnshire and Somerset, and lives in London. Her publications include Lines of Sight (Shearsman, 2009) which focused on Exmoor's Neolithic stone sites, and a collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading, Stone Settings (Odyssey, 2010). An Alphabet for Alina, with artist Peterjon Skelt, exploits the lexical and visual possibilities of an alphabet for girls (Five Seasons, 2012). Halse for hazel (Shearsman, 2014) explored marginal trees and languages, and continued in Sallow, (Leafe, 2016), with images by Irma Irsara. It received an Arts council award. Ada Unseen (Shearsman, 2019) is about the life and work of Ada Lovelace, mathematician and computer visionary, who lived on Exmoor, and was also a collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading, ADADADA (Odyssey, 2022). Presley's Collected Poems 1973-2020 were published in two volumes by Shearsman in 2022. Her latest project, Black Fens Viral began on a slow train through East Anglia's flat, agricultural, landscape of black peat, once marshland. 'Viral' refers both to Covid and to a text generator known as the Markov Chain, with its strange rearrangement of text which resembles a viral assault. The first poem was a Literary Pocket Book (2021) by Steven Hitchins, and the entire sequence was published this year by Shearsman. She has written many essays and reviews, especially on innovative British women poets. Her work is in anthologies including Infinite Difference (2010), Ground Aslant: radical landscape poetry (2011), Out of Everywhere2 (2015), Fractured Ecologies (2020), Arcadian Rustbelt (2025)....

Sommaire:
'Mathematical Science is the language of the unseen relations between things', wrote Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, mathematician and computer visionary. She had a home on Exmoor and this landscape is reimagined through science and poetics, part of a collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading. Ada loved birds and a series of poems on birds and flight are designed like punch cards to isolate key words, creating an alternative text for a woman's life. Various aspects of the 'unseen' are explored including physiology, computing, music, the imaginary, and outer space. There is also an internet cut up and paste of 'Ada' and copious Notes. In Frances Presley's new exhilarating and intellectually stimulating collection, the life and work of Ada Lovelace-innovator in the science of computing, but also lover of birds and music-is both focus and trigger. The concepts of the seen and the unseen in science, poetry and social mores permeate this volume, including contemporary society's blindness to ecological destruction and the historical suppression of women. Creative tensions between the closed and open, the algorithmic and the intuitive, science and nature weave their way deftly through the book in a profusion of evocative and often witty allusions to birds, flight, landscape, architecture, computation and mathematics. Through ambiguous voices, shifts in time and location, quotation, word play, cut and paste, visual patterns and accompanying documentation, Presley gifts us a rousing, profound and multilayered poetic sequence. -Hazel Smith Ada Lovelace provides the catalyst for this collection that juxtaposes the abstractions of science with the resistance of rural environments, particularly on Exmoor where 'gorse is dense unfractured/ spike through every scrub leaf'. Alert to both the play of perception and the realities of climate change, the poems explore a world in which nothing is static: land slips. As the poems unfold they reveal that numbers, too, have a life of their own. In her early contribution to the development of computers, Lovelace saw the potential for making music, and these poems listen acutely to the patterns of language and birdsong, rewilding language as sound and visual score. Encompassing a radical vision of history, landscape and contemporary politics, Frances Presley writes with wit, urgency and a commitment to experiment in its truest sense. -Zo? Skoulding...