Featured poem - October 2009

This piece of writing was selected by the staff at the Scottish Poetry Library which receives Foundation funding from the Scottish Arts Council

Monsieur Probability Abraham de Moivre 1667-1754 You must remember old Abe de Moivre. Handsome Frenchman. The nose not quite aquiline but a nose of note nonetheless. The lip curled in the manner of the French, as if prepared to dismiss any poorly expressed idea. The facial bones gaunt, but refined. Always in Slaughter’s. He used to slaughter me at chess – for a groat, or a cup of coffee. I didn’t grudge him it. He’d fallen on hard times. Had to teach the brats of the nobility. Always carried a few pages he’d cut from the Principia wherever he went. If you needed to know the odds on anything, de Moivre was your man. Monsieur Probability we called him. His Doctrine of Chances became known as the Gambler’s Bible, though he didn’t like to hear it called that, him being a devoted Protestant. Not that he’d had much luck: thrown in jail by Louis the Fourteenth when the scrapped the edict of Nantes. After that he came to St Martin’s Lane. Newton himself would consult him, take him home for a bit of discourse. It was him got de Moivre that commission to decide who came up with the Calculus – Leibniz or Newton, that great debate. The Society was taking no chances. That was the last he saw of Lady Luck. Reduced to advising the likes of me on my chances of winning a wager. Always poring over his figures he was, almost went blind towards the end. Used to sleep over twenty hours a day. They say it was the somnolence killed him. He could always tell the outcome of anything, even foretold the day of his own death: said he slept a quarter hour more every day so he worked out that when he slept for twenty-four that would be the day – and he was right. And what, sir, are the chances of that? from Zero (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009)

About the poet Brian McCabe was born in a small mining community near Edinburgh.  He studied Philosophy and English Literature at Edinburgh University.  He has lived as a freelance writer since 1980.  He has held various writing fellowships, most recently at the University of Edinburgh. He was the Scottish/Canadian Exchange Fellow 1988-89.  His books have won several Scottish Arts Council book awards, and he won the Canongate Prize in 2000.  He is currently Editor of Edinburgh Review and a Royal Literary Fellow at Glasgow University. He has published four collections of poetry: Spring’s Witch (Mariscat Press, 1984); One Atom to Another (Polygon, 1987); Body Parts (Canongate, 1999) and Zero (Polygon 2009).  He also writes fiction  and has published two collections of short stories, The Lipstick Circus (Mainstream, 1985, 1988, 1990) and In a Dark Room with a Stranger (Penguin, 1995) and a novel The Other McCoy (Mainstream 1990 / Penguin 1991). His most recent collection of short stories A Date With My Wife was published by Canongate in 2001. Selected Stories was published by Argyll in 2004.

Inspiration for the Poem "I wrote Monsiueur Probability as part of a book of poems about numbers and mathematics - an odd subject for poetry and for me - I was never very interested in Maths at school.  I got into the subject when I wrote the first poem in the book Counters about learning to count at school, then I read lots of books about Infinity, Chaos Theory and so on, but also books about the history of mathematics.  While I was writing Zero I did the Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in Grez-sur-Loing, and being in France for six weeks I naturally became interested in French Mathematics. One of the things I discovered in writing the book was that mathematicians are a bit like artists, in so far as they intuit a theory before they can prove it.  I found the story of Abraham de Moivre's life quite sad, like that of a down-at-heel writer or artist who has seen better times - but he was a very fine mathematician in his day and was even consulted by Newton."