Mg: A Biography

Gregory Leadbetter

Around twenty grams in each human skeleton –
about the same as the weight of the soul
according to Dr. Duncan MacDougall –
and no less essential: the spirit as magnesium.

We’re slow to see what we can’t live without:
Joseph Black first discerned the element
that, in 1792, Anton Rupprecht
called austrium after his native home,
and Humphry Davy first made pure in 1808 –
the metal he called magnium.

An element always slips its name.
This cousin of silver-white crystalline ore
lives the wisdom of flesh and bone
whether or not we know
the extract from its natural state.

We tap its latent brilliance for light,
but its silence translates the sun:
a single atom of this metal
powers each molecule of chlorophyll.

It is fundamental to life on earth.
Almost too precious to touch with a word.

The Science

In 2018, the Institute for Sustainable Futures at Birmingham City University organised a symposium on magnesium that brought scientists together with industry partners. I was invited to compose a poem to mark the occasion, and that formed the basis of the poem presented here. I had the idea of a biography of the element – a poem that extracted a lore from the ore of its natural and scientific history. I wanted the poem to convey something of our knowledge of magnesium, while telling the story of its entanglement with human activity – especially with language; the reach, the limits and the drama of our knowledge.

The Poet

Gregory Leadbetter is the author of three poetry collections: Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, forthcoming 2020), The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016) and the pamphlet The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). His book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) won the University English Book Prize 2012. He has published widely on English Romantic poetry and thought, twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, and he has written poetry and radio drama for the BBC. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University. You can find him on Twitter @gregmleadbetter.

Next poem: Photonics by Rachel Rayner