Contemporary Poetry & Contemporary Science

This book is the outcome of a project by Robert Crawford, professor of Scottish literature at St. Andrews. It is a unique and rather successful experiment, showing and poetry and science can achieve a productive exchange of mutual insights. Some chapters are contributed essays on an aspect of the theme, while in others the scientist introduces the commissioned poem which is the result of him explaining his work. Eric Priest's research on the Sun is captured in a poem by John Glenday entitled Circadian:

Rise over me in the morning;

lay yourself under me as the darkness breaks;

then ferry me like death, like sleep, like memory,

back through the hidden workings of the night

to a place where everything lies buried, and begins.

The range of topics is wide: Edwin Morgan writes about poetry in virtual realities, Robert Crawford about the human and computational (although he does not refer to Roger Penrose), Simon Armitage about poetry, science and the art of metaphor, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell about astronomy and poetry. The rich texture of the book suggests a promising future for encounters of this kind.