A Responsibility to Awe

by Rebecca Elson, Anne Berkeley (Editor), Angelo di Cintio (Editor), Bernard O'Donoghue (Editor)

Overview

Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe reissued as a Carcanet Classic

A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer, she confronted her early death. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer; her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. "Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination," she wrote. Her poems, like her researches, build imaginative inferences and speculations, setting out from observation, undeterred by knowing how little we can know.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784106553
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	09/27/2018
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	287,849
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Elson was an astronomer. Her principal work focused on globular clusters, teasing out the history of stellar birth, life and death. Born in Montreal, Quebec, of Canadian and US parents, she studied at Smith, St Andrews, and the University of British Columbia. She took her PhD at Cambridge, where she won an Isaac Newton Studentship. She started publishing poems while working at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, and researched at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. In 1991 she returned to the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge to work on the first Hubble data. She died in Cambridge in 1999, aged 39.

Anne Berkeley's pamphlet The buoyancy aid and other poems was published in 1997, and a selection of her work appeared in Oxford Poets 2002. She won the TLS prize in 2000 and the Avron competition in 2004. Angelo di Cintio is an Italian artist to whom Rebecca Elson was married. Bernard O'Donoghue teaches Medieval English at Wadham College, Oxford, and has published seven books of poems, including Gunpowder, which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1995.

Table of Contents

Poems

We Astronomers 9

The Expanding Universe 10

When You Wish upon a Star 11

Girl with a Balloon 12

Explaining Relativity 13

Let There Always be Light 14

Dark Matter 15

Notte di San Giovanni 16

The Last Animists 17

Inventing Zero 18

Theories of Everything 19

Aberration 20

Carnal Knowledge 21

Constellations 22

What if There Were No Moon? 23

Observing 24

Some Thoughts about the Ocean and the Universe 25

Two Nuns, Lido Azzurro, September 26

Olduvai Song Line 27

Poem for my Father 28

Devonian Days 29

To Sarah's Child 30

Evolution 31

Myth 32

Frattura Vecchia 33

February, me Labat 34

The Silk Road 35

Arroyo 36

Moth 37

Salmon Running 38

In Opposition 39

After 40

After Max Ernst 41

Like Eels to the Sargasso Sea 42

To the Fig Tree in the Garden 43

Coming of Age in Foreign Lands 44

Chess Game in a Garden 45

Flying a Kite 46

Family Reunion 47

Futura Vecchia, New Year's Eve 48

Earing Bouillabaisse 49

Radiology South 50

Midwinter, Baffin Bay 51

Yosemite Valley: Coyotes Running through a Sleeping Camp 52

Returning to Camp 53

Hanging out his Boxer Shorts to Dry 54

Beauchamps: Renovations 55

The Ballad of just and While 56

The Still Lives of Appliances 57

OncoMouse, Kitchen Mouse 58

These Two Candles, Saint Pantelehm 59

Antidotes to Fear of Death 61

Extracts from the Notebook 63

From Stones to Stars 147