Theory of Dreams

Yes, Roald Hoffmann is a chemist and a poet. Who has carved out his space between poetry, chemistry and philosophy. In his ninth decade, the poems of this volume move dynamically in that space, responding to memory, nature, science, beauty, and politics. Roald sometimes signs his books "With shared love for the words that build worlds"; that sensitivity - to words and ideas - is his motive force.

Roald survived the Holocaust in Poland; many in his family didn't. Thinking about the experience will not leave him. And strong, strong poems of the singular experience of people in the concentration camps are one feature of this book.

Poetry is the way that horror can be confronted. Poetry may roam more easily in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, far from Roald's normal haunts of Ithaca, but a wondrous place where he spent some summer months. He responds to that beauty, even as the past penetrates here, in unexpected ways blending with reflections on what moles and voles can teach us.

Once you enter Roald's world, it is not far from the voles to the particular hell invented for the senators who voted for Trump in the midst of the Capitol insurrection, or in the connection that rusting Russian vessels in Kamchatka make to images of Mariupol destroyed in 2022, and Warsaw in 1945.

California gives him the inspiration to write, as do the iguanas and supremely sticky pega-pega vegetation of the Galapagos. He is taken by nature to the weeds of Kyushu - his small story of a boy, weeds, and a grandmother who survived Nagasaki in 1945 has been turned into a Japanese children's book.

But nature is not lost in what we threaten to do with it, or in looking at the wondrous underlying biochemistries. Nor is it separated from an olive tree in Yavneh in the first century, with the Messiah chatting under it with Yochanan ben Zakkai.

Stories and images that will not leave you. Proofs, should you need them, that everything in this world is connected to everything else. Come to this book to enter Roald's world.