A Responsibility to Awe (Carcanet Classics)

Book and delivery as advertised.

Powerful, profound piece of writing--poetry and prose--from a scientist who understands that science is necessary inquiry but not an end in itself.

Extraordinary, deep, thought provoking poetry! The Universe opens!

I am not awed but I love that the author is.

What a moving collection of prose and poetry covering the last years of Rebecca Elson's life. I wouldn't be without this volume.

What a moving collection from an underrated poet and journal keeper and world class astronomer. I've gone back to it many times over the years and I've always been glad I did. She deserves a much larger audience.

Luminous writing.

Stunning and incredibly moving poetry. Loved it!

This first part of this book is a collection of the finished / published poems Elson wrote. The first quarter of them belong to a gifted writer who hasn’t found her voice. The remainder are real deal Elson. The poems I found most affecting were those which dealt with the passion of relationships—not love or sex, but passion.The second part of the book is a poetic diary. A few of the entries are worked up into finished poems, like the wonderful Dark Matter from October 1993, which begins “Seeing, like that, only purple
 // You would understand your world From a few iris, 
// A few bolts of silk, 
// And emptiness.”The remainder are light watercolour sketches of the events of the day that remind me of O'Hara's Lunch Poems. Elson sometimes experiments with tightening the phrasing to make the entries more conventionally poetic, but I think they work perfectly in their original, delicate state.

Some time ago I bought a book called `Globular Clusters' since i was interested in learning more about those almost-alive little balls of stars (`Little' of course only in relation to galaxies!) In it was a long but very readable article about their evolution and dynamics written by a Rebecca Elson. THEN i found that the book was dedicated to her memory, and THEN on further investigation I found that confusingly there was a poet of that name. And only THEN I found that they were the same person: an accomplished astronomer and expert on clusters (working with data streams from the Hubble Telescope among other projects)., and in the same body was an equally accomplished poet with her feet very firmly on the ground and a wonderful love of life, writing excellent poetry, much of which was written after she knew that she had very few years- or even months - to live. A poet who was also an astronomer, not just an astronomer who wrote poetry. I wish there were more like her.I loved all the poems, and also the many extracts from her workbooks that are fragments of poems or even potential lines. A sad loss to the world. By the way, pages from that `Globular cluster' book are used as end=plates in this book, they show the sort of work she did.`Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death I eat the stars.'`

An excellent and unique collection by this astronomer-poet which sensitively and intelligently considers our smaller lives on earth and our place in the larger universe. The use of language is bold and direct the imagery ocxcasionally startling and sometimes playful. The play of wit, in the older sense of the word, is ever-present. I particulalry likedf the inclusion of some of Rebecca Elson's notebbok entries which give an idea of her vision and working methods, and a glimpse of promising proto- poems which will neve rbe finished. It is a great shame and sadness that she died so young and therer will be no more of this fine work to follow.

This book of poems offers a new perspective on the world. Poetic, witty, clever, smart and enlightening it brightens up my day.