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? // 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.

© Jane Routh 2002