The Ghost in the Machine: Poems of Love, Loss, Life and Death

by Barbara Lennox

The poetry of Barbara Lennox has been inspired by the natural world, history and mythology, scientific ideas and the many facets of the human condition, from love to loss, and from life to death and everything in between.

The poems are thoughtful, quirky, questioning and lyrical. A skilful use of metaphor and language throws a fresh light on topics as diverse as a fossil bird, a mythical tree, the inheritance pattern of comb shape in chickens, and the final journey we all have to make.

Kindle Edition

First published March 3, 2021

About the author

I was born, and still live, in Scotland on the shores of a river, between the mountains and the sea. I’m a retired scientist and science administrator, but have always been fascinated by the early history of Scotland, and I love fleshing out that history with the stories of fictional, and not-so-fictional, characters.

Reviews

[Deborah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poetry is either ‘very good or not so much’ in my opinion. I really didn’t care for this book of poems. Nothing much spoke to me. I trudged through most of it and skimmed too. You might like it as others did.

[Steve Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection of poems by Scottish writer, Barbara Lennox. It deals with themes of the natural world, myths, science and the human condition. There is a sense of living at a mid-point, a delicate balance of ‘trying to return, but never quite arriving.’ The poet has a beautiful turn of phrase, using alliterative language that reminds me of Seamus Heaney: ‘From every slope there rings/ a rush and purl of streams/ pocked by peat-dark tarns’. Munro-Bagging flips on its head the competitive, nature-as-a-challenge scenario to the sublime realisation that one day the mountain will be remembered ‘not as a number but a field of scree,/ a wing of snow, a route through heather/ and a sweet wild gale’. Even when we’re marching carefree up hills, foundations are being laid in memory to sustain us in the years to come.

I enjoyed the poems about birds, including Owl (‘ears inhale every sound’), Hawking (‘she’s light,/ ready for the off,/ half-poised for flight’), and the extinct Archaeopteryx, ‘smeared to a layer of limestone’. The poems about the past and myths maintain a fresh, contemporary feel. (I have a particular fondness for the poem Bean-Nighe, having written about one of these mythical Scottish washerwomen who mourn the dead myself.) I also liked the way that Lennox brings science into her poetry, with a tension between human / animal experience and a more mechanistic approach to life. She doesn’t take sides, but rather stays within the realm of mystery and uncertainty: ‘I’m neither faith nor reason, but the shadow of a doubt.’

This is an excellent book, nuanced, accessible, human. It’s full of powerful ideas and exquisite language. Highly recommended.

[Sherry Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barbara Lennox, who is a trained scientist, observes the natural world with loving and critical detail and she analyses what she observes through the lens of a poet and a philosopher. She speaks of the profound and shows us illuminating flashes of the ghost in the machine, the spirit in all living things, the delicate balance of life and death, endurance and extinction, pure joy and bittersweet loss. She teachers us about the connectivity of everything and how a single moment of true emersion in nature can give us a moment of true transcendence. We not only can experience the ghost, we are of the ghost ourselves.

In this collection of poems Lennox has arranged and placed them into four categories: Nature, The Past, (in which she shows her knowledge of both history and mythology) Ideas (thoughtful and provoking) and The Human Condition (so human).

Under Nature, you will find these riveting words from the title poem:

“I am not life or death
but the smoke of their collision,
the first breath, the last gasp.”

In her poem Brock (a badger) we read:

“They are sleek
and powerful
under the moon,
with limbs like shovels.
They are striped with midnight.”

In Past we know the dying of an orca in her poem Hulk:

“But in time she turned silent,
slipped into a doze that was half a dream
of coiling ink-black seas
beneath a firmament of night.”

Under Ideas we find the mesmerizing poem Eclipse of the Moon. Listen to these magnificent words:

“And so it seemed the moon I knew –
the serene and silver globe
that sails between the nebulae of space –
was now a bowl of blood, bleeding into a night
razor sharp with stars.”

And as an example from The Human Condition, from her poem Living in the Moment:

“I see the angle of a seagull’s wing,
The perfect green of a leaf.
I feel the warmth of a man’s sleeping body.”

This is a book not to be missed by those who love poetry, and a book to launch a love of poetry for those who may have shied away before.

[A.J. Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! An intriguing collection of quirky poems written over two decades, inspired by the natural world, science and the human spirit.

A must-read for all those who love poetry.

[Julia Blake · Rating 5 out of 5]

A satisfying and richly fulfilling collection of verses. It's ideal for dipping in and out of when your mind can’t settle to fiction. Each poem feels personal, as though based on something the author has experienced and is deeply familiar with.

As someone for whom poetry is not my go-to genre, I thoroughly enjoyed this collection.

[Barbara Lennox · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 69 poems in this collection were written over a 20 year period, and for no particular reason except that sometimes an idea was best expressed as a poem rather than a short story or longer piece of fiction. They were ways for me to explore the world, and, since my world included science, scientific ideas were a major influence in these poems. But they were also influenced by mythology, and the landscape and natural history of Scotland.

I like playing with language and rhythm, but don’t like being confined by an established form, whether this is rhyming or not, although I do enjoy the challenge of writing to form on occasion. Mostly, however, the poems are free verse, and a large proportion are short and to the point. Poetry works best, I find, when a poem takes something small and uses it to say something much bigger about the world in general. So, many of the poems are of this type.

The poems are divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into the following sections: Nature, The Past, Ideas and The Human Condition. There's something for everyone in this collection.

[E Steele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical, eloquent, precise. It’s rare for a poetry collection to span all three but this one does, capturing the world around us and the landscape of the human heart both movingly and accurately. I had thought of listing my favourite poems but I might as well say, just read the whole book!