The Independent - A Week in Books: The lost star who still sheds light on inner and outer space
By Boyd Tonkin - 03 November 2001

Self-promoting science writers often like to claim that the literary tradition in Britain
derides and despises what they do. That may be true of minor pundits; for major poets, it's
demonstrably false. From John Donne's raids on Renaissance "new philosophy" to the
science-friendly work of current poets such as Lavinia Greenlaw, one strand of English verse
has always relished the quests of the experimental intellect. And for most of modern history,
the pernicious doctrine of the "two cultures" was quite unknown. Less than 300 lines into
Paradise Lost, Milton compares the shield on Satan's shoulders to "the moon, whose
orb/ Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views/ At evening from the top of Fesole". The
"Tuscan artist" is Galileo, whom the young poet had visited in 1639.

Apart from the special case of literary doctors, professional scientists who practise poetry
have been a far rarer breed. That scarcity makes it all the more poignant to discover a
scientist-poet of real stature who has already finished an extraordinary life's work. Rebecca
Elson, who died aged 39 in May 1999, found her vocation as an astronomer when she first looked
through an "optic glass". Her father was a Canadian geologist, and childhood summers were
spent pebble-sorting beside northern lakes ("It was a long time before I realised that, to
most people, beaches were where you went to swim"). Then the star-gazing bug bit, and led to
a career that meant "my mind could wander over all the questions of space and infinity and
origins that I had always loved to think about."

After a master's degree in British Columbia, where attending the otherwise all-male classes
felt "like walking into the men's bathroom by mistake", Elson studied for a PhD at Cambridge,
followed by research work at Princeton and Harvard. She specialised in the "globular clusters"
of stars that "drift around in the halo of our galaxy", and probed the unfathomable "dark
matter" that fills much of the universe.

In 1991, she moved back to the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, where she worked to great
professional acclaim on data from the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1996, she married the Italian
artist Angelo di Cintio; a couple of years later, the cancer she had suffered from a few years
before returned. Her legacy consists of 52 scientific papers and a luminous body of poetry
(which she had written since her teens).

Carcanet Press has collected her best poems, with extracts from her notebooks and an
autobiographical essay, as A Responsibility to Awe (£6.95). This is a wise and haunting
volume, which I can't recommend too warmly. Elson's metaphors from cosmology and evolution cut
both ways. Her science shapes the ordinary poetic traffic of love and time, desire and decay
as in "Carnal Knowledge", where "The body aches/ To come too/ To the light... Express in its own
algebra/ The symmetries of awe and fear". Equally, the feel of nearby things can illuminate the
universe: "Constellations" imagines star-systems "not as minor gods/mounted in eternal in
memoriam", but as "lambada dancers/Practising their slow seductions/ On the manifolds of space".

For all her vast themes, Elson's language is often skittish or playful. (No other astronomer
of repute can ever have composed a poem called "Hanging out his Boxer Shorts to Dry"). Yet she
can be almost mystical: a fine fragment on "dark matter" unites it with the secret tug of the
unconscious, "A sudden swerve of thought, mid-stride:/ The deep well of almost weightless
memory,/ The dense body of a passing god."

"Who will I have been/ When I'm gone?" pleads a notebook entry, weeks before Rebecca Elson's
death. From her peers' accounts, she was a cosmologist of high distinction; and from the
evidence in A Responsibility to Awe, a singularly gifted poet, too. Most of all,
perhaps, she was someone whose rich life proved that sparring specialisms betray the
wholeness of the human mind. Read her book and do your bit to bury those "two cultures" for good.