A Responsibility to Awe

Reviews / Votes

'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, GBP6.95, 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? // Can't I just go back / to the mountains...'

And as if this were not enough, the book closes with 'From Stones to Stars', an essay she wrote in 1998 about her longstanding interest in science from childhood. 'Poem for my Father' touches on this too:

Following you down a strand line

...

You honouring all my questions

With your own.

The essay discusses her struggle to be a scientist in a Princeton which was 'irrefutably male'. 'In indefinable ways it was alienating.' (p 157) A gathering of poets on Tuesday evenings kept her afloat. (Cambridge, by contrast, 'had never really seemed a bastion of male scientists'.) It's a wonderful piece to show to a young person sitting science A levels, with the prospect of 'days inside a tent with such a dazzling roof'. Rebecca Elson's excitement in her discipline is infectious. And that's not least because she writes as a whole person, openly observing herself and the world she moves through.

(c) Jane Routh 2002 Dark matter in poetic measure

Peter Howard PhysicsWeb January 2002

There has been much interest recently in collaborations between art and science. One difficulty with such ventures is that you have to bring together scientists who understand and appreciate art, and artists who understand science. This isn't always easy to achieve. Rebecca Elson, who died in 1999, would have been ideal for such a venture. She was both a successful astronomer and a fine poet, as this remarkable book, which brings together both her science and her art, makes clear.

Elson was born in Montreal in 1960, the daughter of a geologist father. Her interest in poetry began as a child, although it was not until 1987 that her first poems were published. At university she studied physics, obtaining an MSc from the University of British Columbia and then a PhD from the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. After holding several post-doctoral fellowships in the US, she returned to Cambridge, where she worked from 1991 until her death. Her research focused in the main on stellar populations and star clusters in different environments.

Elson's concern was always to ground her scientific work in human terms. This cannot have been easy when studying the most distant globular cluster system ever observed. As she writes in an essay reprinted in the book: "There are times when the enterprise seems mechanical...and the mysteries of the Universe seem irrelevant to the lives we humans live down here." But time and again you can see her making connections between the physical and the moral, the universal and the human.

This is not a straightforward book of poetry. The first third contains Elson's poems, with a further half or so of the book devoted to extracts from her laboratory notebooks. It concludes with an essay entitled "From stones to stars", which describes her scientific education and career - from assisting with her father's geology fieldwork as a child, to her research into star clusters at Cambridge.

The essay was originally prepared for a forthcoming collection of autobiographical essays by alumnae of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College in the US. It contains several sharp comments on academic society from the perspective of a female scientist. Cambridge is fortunate to get off much more lightly than Princeton. As Elson writes: "Of course Cambridge was dominated by men, but...Princeton on the other hand was irrefutably male, both in the occupants of E building, where the astronomers worked, and in the way the place was run. In indefinable ways, it was alienating."

Elson's poems tend to be highly compressed, and visually very specific. There are echoes of Dickinson, Millay, even Plath, in places. None of those poets, though, could have written a poem that begins:

Having picked the final datum

From the universe

And fixed it in its column,

Named the causes of infinity,

Performed the calculus

Of the imaginary i...

Elson not only writes such a poem, she makes it sexy, and calls it Carnal Knowledge.

Many of her poems relate science to the human scale, which often results in beautiful metaphors of scientific concepts. In the poem Explaining Relativity, for example, she gives about as good an explanation of general relativity as one could hope for in three lines:

It's so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,

Where space might cup itself around a planet

Like your palm around a stone

Not all the poems are concerned with science. From one perspective, Elson was a person who just happened to do science. Her poems reflect her concerns, which happened to include science. But there are also poems about nuns bathing, hanging out her husband's boxer shorts to dry, and a reunion in which family members are portrayed as boats. There is a hilarious poem about kitchen appliances, followed by a reflection on the mice that researchers use to study the cancer from which she ultimately died. By mixing her science poems with those of a more general nature, Elson makes them seem less specifically "scientific" and more just part of her concerns as a human being. This makes them less frightening and easier to approach for readers without a scientific background.

The notebook extracts - which are literary, rather than scientific - are arguably the most fascinating part of the book. They contain material from four notebooks that were written by Elson between 1991 and her death. Although there are references to her astronomical work, these occur when she is using that work as material for a poem or essay. There are no equations and no musings on any astronomical data.

Many of the notebook entries are in verse, and it is often tempting to read these as poems. However, this approach should be resisted. The entries are quite clearly drafts and experimental approaches - rather than final, polished works. Nevertheless, there is more poetry in some of these drafts than in many "finished" poems I have seen, and the temptation to read them as completed pieces can be irresistible.

Consider the following example, from an entry headed Travelling Light, written on 11 September 1996:

We carry what comforts and sustains

Which can be space itself & time

Not things, which only weigh us down

Stepping gently over the earth

If you could move like light

How things would slow, & stop

Sometimes Elson can be seen worrying at the same idea over several years, trying different approaches, different articulations to her poetry. Her notebook extracts, for example, reveal the various attempts that she made to communicate the idea of dark matter. She is not trying to explain the concept, but trying to convey why it is fascinating to her, why it is important. The five-line poem Dark Matter that emerges from this process is a model of clarity and concision:

Above a pond,

An unseen filament

Of spider's floss

Suspends a slowly

Spinning leaf.

It must have been very difficult and also frustrating for the editors of the notebook extracts - Angelo di Cintio (Elson's husband), and her friend and fellow poet Anne Berkeley - to decide what to include in the book, which seems to contain less than a fifth of the original material. The editors have, however, tried to show the range of the material in the notebooks, and to give an impression of Elson's working methods. I think they've succeeded. But rather like trying to infer the properties of dark matter from the stars you can see, it is difficult to tell when you do not know what was left out.

I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in poetry or science, or who simply wants to learn more about the remarkable Rebecca Elson.

Peter Howard is a telecommunication systems design consultant and a poet, e-mail peter@hphoward.demon.co.uk. He knew Rebecca Elson through her poetry, and was a member of the same writing group in Cambridge