Cart
Free US shipping over $10
Proud to be B-Corp

Ada Unseen Frances Presley

Ada Unseen By Frances Presley

Ada Unseen by Frances Presley


$23.19
Condition - New
Only 2 left

Summary

In exhilarating and intellectually stimulating new 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 permeate this volume, including society's blindness to ecological destruction and the suppression of women.

Ada Unseen Summary

Ada Unseen by Frances Presley

`Mathematical Science is the language of the unseen relations between things', wrote Ada Lovelace, mathematician and computer visionary. She had a home on Exmoor and this landscape is reimagined through a combination of science and poetics, also part of a collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading, ADADA:landescape. Ada loved birds, especially song birds, and studied the theory of flight. In a series of poems about birds and flight some are designed like punch cards to isolate key words and create an alternative text for a woman's life. The third sequence explores, through a 21st century lens, various aspects of the 'unseen' which were of interest to Ada: these include the human body, computing, music, the imaginary, and dark matter. There is also an internet cut up and paste on the word `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.

About Frances Presley

Frances Presley was born in Derbyshire in 1952, and grew up in Lincolnshire and Somerset. She now lives and works in London. Publications of poems and prose include The Sex of Art, Hula Hoop and Linocut. She collaborated with artist Irma Irsara, in a multi-media performance about the fashion trade in London, Automatic Cross Stitch; and with Elizabeth James in an email text and performance, Neither the One Nor the Other. Somerset Letters (Oasis Books, 2002), with drawings by Ian Robinson, explored intersections of community and landscape. The title sequence of Paravane: new and selected poems, 1996-2003 is a response to 9/11. Myne: new and selected poems and prose, 1976-2006 includes two landscape sequences: the most recent is `Stone settings', an approach to the Neolithic sites on Exmoor, which is also a collaboration and multi-media performance with Tilla Brading. This reappears with further new work in her 2009 collection, Lines of sight. Sine that book, Frances Presley has published Halse for hazel. She has also co-translated the work of the Norwegian poets Hanne Bramness (Salt on the eye) and Lars Amund Vaage (Outside the Institution. Selected Poems).

Additional information

NPB9781848616639
9781848616639
1848616635
Ada Unseen by Frances Presley
New
Paperback
Shearsman Books
2019-03-12
120
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a new book - be the first to read this copy. With untouched pages and a perfect binding, your brand new copy is ready to be opened for the first time

Customer Reviews - Ada Unseen