Theory of Dreams – Roald Hoffmann

Roald Hoffmann reads from his new poetry collection Theory of Dreams. About the book: At times, Roald Hoffmann signs his books “With shared love for the words that build worlds”. That openness – to words, experience, and ideas – is what moves him in sixth poetry collection. Once you enter Roald’s world, it is not far from the moles and voles of of the Santa Cruz mountains to the particular hell invented for the senators who voted for Trump in the midst of the Capitol insurrection, or in the connection that rusting Russian vessels in Kamchatka make to images of Mariupol destroyed in 2022, and Warsaw in 1945. California gives him the inspiration to write, as do the iguanas and supremely sticky pega-pega vegetation of the Galápagos. He is taken by nature to the weeds of Kyushu, and… Nagasaki in 1945. And… under an olive tree in Yavneh in the first century, he has the Messiah chatting with Yochanan ben Zakkai. Stories (in poems) and images that will not leave you. Proofs, should you need them, that everything in this world is connected to everything else. Come to this book to enter Roald’s world. Roald Hoffmann had his first real introduction to poetry at Columbia College from Mark Van Doren. He started writing poetry in the mid-seventies, but it is only in 1984 that his work began to be published. Hoffmann owes much to a poetry group at Cornell that included the late A. R. Ammons, Phyllis Janowitz and David Burak (still alive and kickin’), as well as to Maxine Kumin. “Theory of Dreams,” is his sixth published poetry collection in English, the only language in which he writes, and which was his sixth language when he and his parents came to America. There have also been published three bilingual collections of his poems, one in Russian and English, and two in Spanish and English on facing pages. Roald also writes nonfiction (five books) and plays (three plays produced). He made a living as a chemist, and is proud of teaching thousands. And he moves in a land he has carved out, ‘twixt science, poetry, and philosophy.