The term “patternicity,” as writer Michael Shermer explains in a 2008 Scientific American article, refers to the human predisposition “to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.” It is an attempt to impose order on what seems like chaos.

Jim Johnstone’s poetry often references scientific principles and observable phenomena. However, in its often illogical – or at least unlikely – conclusions (Shermer uses the example of the devout perceiving the Virgin Mary on the side of a building), patternicity is anathema to the scientific method, which insists that measurable results be observed under replicable conditions. In this, Johnstone’s poetry constitutes an unlikely marriage of faith and science.

“9.69,” a poem dedicated to Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, begins with an allusion to the discovery of gunpowder, extrapolating from there to the origin of the starter pistol that fires as “each sprinter splits from the blocks, / hopelessly elemental.” The act of running – and specifically, Bolt’s world record of 100 metres in 9.69 seconds – is elevated to the level of mystical experience: “It must be that the moment we look away, / some of us travel as breath.” Pure physics vies with superstition.

Patternicity transforms the mundane into the otherworldly. A game of street hockey is “six of us wheeling on / diurnal axes each Sunday”; an overturned bike following a road accident is “a haze of molecules, frantic / symmetry.” Occasionally, Johnstone’s surreal scientific perspective seems self-involved. Largely, though, it’s a compelling system of thought.