A Responsibility to Awe
Rebecca Elson author Bernard O'Donoghue editor Anne Berkeley editor Angelo di Cintio editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:27th Sep '18
Should be back in stock very soon
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.
'With great poignancy, she shows us the world through the eyes of a human being faced by her finite time.'
The Economist Books of the Year, 2001
'If Stephen Hawkin's last book opened your eyes to science writing, Rebecca Elson's reissued A Responsibility to Awe will open your heart to it.'
Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
extract from But is it Science?
review by Jane Routh Stride Magazine
To see the whole text of this review go to http://www.madbear.demon.co.uk/stridemag/2002/june/science.htm
A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson, 159pp, £6.95, Carcanet
...So a poem in this collection [Of Science] could be by Rebecca Elson, a research astronomer whose A Responsibility to Awe (another book I'm glad I bought) was published posthumously. Several poems address her discipline, but with so light a touch you're aware of her humanity not her background: 'The Expanding Universe' begins 'How do they know, he is asking, / He is seven, maybe'.The poem 'What if There Were no Moon' opens 'There would be no months / A still sea / No spring tides' and closes with the stunning:
No place to stand
And watch the Earth rise
Elson's work took her around the world: the poems swing out, then back to her family. There is little mention of her cancer, except in poems like 'Radiology South' and 'OncoMouse, Kitchen Mouse': 'I hear you down there in the dark / When your cousins in my head / Are waking up'.
But the poems are only part: extracts from her notebooks make up almost half of the book. Verse-notes, observations, explorations, the fresh, first-discovered thoughts that might later be worked into a poem...it is a rare privilege to read a writer's notebook, with it's crossings-outs and re-workings, and examples (I wish the editors had included more) of what she took through into a finished poem. The notebooks are intimate, wide-ranging, illuminating - and : just before she died (at 39), she wrote: 'Who would have thought / I'd be the first to go / of all of us / The first departure / First death / And ten years to contemplate / The going / Why me to face all this?
ISBN: 9781784106553
Dimensions: 216mm x 135mm x 13mm
Weight: unknown
160 pages
New edition