Dickinson’s poetry reads like an exploration of the relationship between literature and science. This is not achieved by reporting such explorative exploits in the actual poems but rather by bringing together materials, trains of thought and methods of approach from the two disciplines so that new light can be thrown on the matter of how we view each other and the world, the kind of ethics we uphold and how knowledge works. In previous collections it was cartography and taxonomy that were central themes, disciplines that set out to define facets of the world in the knowledge that such approaches are not without their downsides. In his newest collection, The Polymers, Dickinson subjects our contemporary world and lifestyle to comparisons with the structure and ‘behaviour’ of polymers, large molecules made up of series of identical components, as in the case of most plastics, but also proteins, carbohydrates, wood and the external skeletons of insects. Plastics, carbohydrates and culture are more closely related to each other than one might expect, and in the poetry of Dickinson we can discover exactly why that is so.

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