Annus Mirabilis

Poet Sally Ball’s debut collection of poems, Annus Mirabilis (2005), follows the narratives of great mathematical and scientific thinkers Newton and Leibniz, the rival inventors of calculus. The overarching themes revolve around the pains that come from knowing or acquiring knowledge, and the human impulse to learn and know, and by knowing, master a particular subject, topic, landscape, etc. The poems have a Zen-like quality in their philosophical reflection on the nature of knowledge and its connections to suffering while offering human stories of invention, knowledge, and pain.

Dueling narratives shape many of the poems, giving the collection its structure. The collection is split into three sections reflecting the twining together of the narratives of Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, and of Sally Ball herself into a complete piece about the nature of acquiring knowledge and how science and personal life collide and influence one another.

In the title poem, “Annus Mirabilis,” the stories of Newton and Leibniz compete as the two men develop the formulas for which they are famous. The title means “wonderful year” or “amazing year” in Latin, and is frequently used to describe the year 1666, when Sir Isaac Newton developed his formulae for gravitation, calculus, and motion. The poem discusses the many similarities in the lives of Newton and Leibniz, including “dead fathers, bookishness, rigorous, enormous curiosity, sitting for hours at a stretch in one chair, thinking, not sleeping enough, never marrying, egotism, alchemy, the abandonment of alchemy.” Later in the poem, Ball reflects on Newton's troubled past and Leibniz’s much safer and more comfortable one. While Leibniz enjoyed the pleasantries of his family life for many years before the death of his father, Newton was essentially born an orphan, his father dying three months before his birth and his mother moving away when he was three years old. For this reason, Ball thinks, Newton kept his calculations to himself, while Leibniz published his. Ball writes of their differences, “Why publish? That makes a self instead of losing one.”



Ball also incorporates many of the poems that Newton and Leibniz wrote into her poetry, creating a kind of new language that shapes the structures of metaphors about relationships and love. The relationships of daily life, with mothers, fathers, children, lovers, the postman, and the grocer, are like formulas, she argues, using the ideas of lift and motion to convey the ever-changing nature of our social worlds. Underlying that narrative, however, is a darker message about how no formula can truly convey the nature of the self and the impulses of humankind. This becomes a theme in the rest of the collection, as the nature of curiosity and the pains of knowledge become the focus.

Ball writes in her poetry about Newton and Leibniz’s natural curiosity and desire to understand the universe and how that desire stems, in part, from discomfort – a need for meaning in chaos, a formula to explain the nature of the world. Unfortunately, Ball concludes, this kind of formula is impossible, and, in fact, knowledge often only forces us to stare more deliberately at what we try to avoid – the cruelest parts of ourselves, of each other, of the world, and the nature of mortality. As such, the poems have a dark tone, discussing both the beauty of invention and the curiosity to learn besides the dark underbelly of knowledge and truth, which only show us more clearly what we cannot control.

Sally Ball is the author of three collections of poetry: Annus Mirabilis, Wreck Me, and Hold Sway. A professor at Arizona State University, she serves as the associate director of Four Way Books. Her work has been published in Best American Poetry 2005, Harvard Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and many other journals. In 2007, she was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Breadloaf Writers Conference, and in 2011, she earned an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship.