ENTANGLEMENTS: Physics, love, and wilderness dreams

Entanglements: Physics, Love, and Wilderness Dreams, Jack Mayer’s second poetry collection, is a poetic mélange about relationships, from sub-atomic particles to our human family; the ties that bind. Mayer, a pediatrician, poet, and hiker, explores the metaphysics of cosmology and that particularly intense entanglement, love. At the macroscopic level, Mayer’s doctor poems, inspired by his pediatric practice in rural Northern Vermont, take the reader into the heart and soul of a healer inspired to find meaning in his patients’ often difficult lives. Unique connections are unearthed. As a wilderness hiker and canoeist, Mayer has experienced the healing power of wilderness; the mystery of belonging to wilderness, of independence and interdependence. His wilderness poems carry us into his beloved Green Mountains on Vermont’s Long Trail. On solo hikes he composes poems, then copies his first draft into the nearest shelter’s logbook under his trail name, “Mountain Poet.” A durable thread connects these musings on relationships, our fundamental connections. Our quest for meaning depends on relationships, the matrix within which we endeavor to understand. Life is entangled. We are entangled.

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“Jack Mayer has once again combined a sense of wonder, a deep curiosity, a keen eye, and an almost infinite capacity for empathy and love with the ability to translate those into the 'best words in the best order'. This is a beautiful book about the miracle that each of us represents in this chaotic and somehow ordered universe, especially when we find that special entanglement called love.”

—Michael Epstein, Retired Assoc. Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Founder, www.EpsteinReads.com (Bookmarks) and Chairman of the Board Mary L. Blood Memorial Library, West Windsor, Vermont

“In this collection of free verse, a physician artfully expresses his being in the world, blending science, wit, and the pang of human experience.”

—Alan Lightman, novelist, essayist, physicist, and educator. Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT

—Jay Parini, D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing · Middlebury College, poet and author of Robert Frost: a Life, Benjamin’s Crossing, The Last Station and many more

“From heartbreaking verses evoking his medical practice amidst rural poverty, to the mysterious ‘spooky action at a distance’ entanglement of quantum physics, and on to musings on the covid pandemic, on love, and on wilderness and dreams, Jack Mayer’s poems celebrate entanglement in all its aspects—entanglement of doctor and patient, of quantum particles, of long-time lovers, of human and nature, and even entanglement of the body’s parts seen as a medical student dissects a cadaver. For all the poems in this remarkable collection, entanglement serves as metaphor for the broader interconnectedness of our world.”

—Rich Wolfson, Benjamin F. Wissler Professor Emeritus of Physics, Middlebury College