Signing the Light

About the Book

These are poems drawn from a long life, written in old age but derived from all ages from childhood on. From my high-school years until I retired from being a professor of physics I worked in scientific research and teaching, and that way of seeing and enjoying the world was my meat and drink. Soon after retirement I discovered another world view, that found in reading and writing poetry. My poems are rooted in my happy childhood, with loving parents and siblings; in long-life love between myself and my wife, our children and theirs; in private happiness set in the public tragedy of southern Africa, where my life began; in the mountains, plains and skies of western Canada, where it will end; in the griefs that are the shadow sides of loves; in the joy of understanding small and large realities of the universe in the scientific domain; and in my exploration of the reality, behind and in the created world, of its Creator. My understanding of the natural world in terms of Darwinian selection must co-exist, in what I write, with my belief in a God whose essence is love and who suffers with us in our griefs. These are the sources of the poems. Of the river, they themselves must speak.

About the Author

I, Denis Ian Gough, was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa 84 years ago. In that windy seaport, and later in the smaller port of East London further northeast along the coast, I was given a secure and loved childhood, with my sister Margaret and my brother Ray, by our parents but especially by my indomitable mother, in spite of my father's illness and early retirement. I spent the first half of my life in South Africa where I married Winifred (Wendy) Nelson, who has given me a wonderful life and two children, Catherine and Stephen. After taking two science degrees at Rhodes University, with three years of war service in between, I hugely enjoyed becoming a geophysicist and a researcher into large-scale structures and processes in the Earth, in a small but excellent research institute in Johannesburg. The family moved to Rhodesia in 1958, to Texas in 1964 and to Edmonton, Alberta in 1966. In all of these places I was fortunate to work in studies of earth structure and processes, and to teach physics and geophysics in universities of quality.

Wendy and I have spent nearly half of our lives, so far, in western Canada and share a love of this part of the world, of the generous people we live among and of the universe as seen by scientists. In particular we find joy in insights into planet Earth. My working life has seen great changes in the way this planet is understood. It is now seen as a dynamic system of tectonic plates in slow motion, growing and separating at mid-ocean ridges and colliding in several ways, with associated earthquakes; the plates driven by thermal convection in the mantle beneath the crust. I have enjoyed contributing to this dynamic view of the planet. The science itself is better described in prose, but some of my poems convey something of the excitement of the discoveries of recent decades. Of my 103 published papers I specially value two Wendy and I wrote together in 1970, on earthquakes triggered by the filling of one of the planet's largest reservoirs, Lake Kariba on the Zambesi River in central Africa.

Soon after my retirement from the University of Alberta in 1990, I discovered a love of reading and writing poetry. In that discovery and writing of several hundreds of poems, my sister Margaret, a well-known poet in South Africa, has served as mentor and given me endless encouragement, from the day in 1990 when I, a youngster of 68, sent her a poem written on a laptop in a truck during geophysical field work in the Karroo, a semi-arid region of South Africa. She saw the possibilities in it and told me to continue, and she has read every poem I've written since. My science informs many of my poems, without (I hope) becoming didactic; my roots are in both South Africa and western Canada, as the cover pictures suggest; but the whole range of human experience, love against loss, joy against suffering, light against the interstellar dark, spirit informing daily life, and the need to worship something greater than one's self, are spoken of in the poems: with what success, the reader will decide.