Scan barcode
anyu's review against another edition
4.0
Trying to figure out why I'm giving this 4 stars. I didn't find the notebook drafts very compelling, and they make up the bulk of the book. But a few of the finished, more polished poems will stay with me. Critic R.P. Blackmur wrote that one of the things good poetry can offer us is “a fresh idiom”, or language phrased in such a way that it “not only expresses the matter at hand but adds to the stock of available reality.” I think fresh idioms are what I'm looking for in a poetry collection—finding a handful of them feels gratifying enough. Some of the poems here were unremarkable (and I always deplore the lack of attention paid to metre in contemporary English poetry) but some had lovely metaphors to offer, like “the lacework of birdsounds”, or the “persuasion” of spacetime in “Explaining Relativity” (Where space might cup itself around a planet / like your palm around a stone). There was also, in the poem “Explaining dark matter”, the verse as if you could infer the day from vestigial heat; or the last verse of “What if there were no moon?” — There would be no place to stand / and watch the Earth rise.
And I liked the imagery of “Dark Matter” and “Notte di San Giovanni”. And “The Last Animists”, which ends with:
We say the dreams of night
Are within us
As blood within flesh
As spirit within substance
As the oneness of things
As from a dust of pigeons
The white light of wings.
This one will join Archibald MacLeish’s “Baccalaureate” in my list of Nice Poems Containing Pigeons Wings.
And I liked the imagery of “Dark Matter” and “Notte di San Giovanni”. And “The Last Animists”, which ends with:
We say the dreams of night
Are within us
As blood within flesh
As spirit within substance
As the oneness of things
As from a dust of pigeons
The white light of wings.
This one will join Archibald MacLeish’s “Baccalaureate” in my list of Nice Poems Containing Pigeons Wings.
priyabhakta's review against another edition
5.0
Lovely poetry by a fascinating writer. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer as well as a writer and this book was published posthumously. There's a range of poetry and a few short stories (which do read like poetry as well) from her notebooks. She writes about her work, her feelings and struggle with cancer. It's intensely personal and reading it offers the comfort of like being with a good friend.
loppear's review
3.0
Quick mostly single page single idea poems of every day and astrophysics. The notebook drafts and whims included at the back of my copy are at least as good as the collection.
More...