A Responsibility to Awe

Rebecca Elson, Anne Berkeley, Angelo di Cintio, Bernard O'Donoghue, Anne Berkeley, Angelo di Cintio, Bernard O'Donoghue

• Publisher: Carcanet Classics
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781784106553
• eBook ISBN: 9781784106560
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe reissued as a Carcanet Classic
A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer, she confronted her early death. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer; her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. "Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination, "she wrote. Her poems, like her researches, build imaginative inferences and speculations, setting out from observation, undeterred by knowing how little we can know.

Extracts from the Notebook

Editorial note

Becky kept her notes in Chartwell A4 hardback volumes of 160 pages. There are four of them represented here, beginning with the first, undated, entry in Spring 1991, when she returned to England, and ending with the final entry on Monday 3 May 1999, thirteen days before she died.

She wrote in pencil, legibly and freely, drafting and redrafting poems, stories and essays. She would tackle a difficult idea again and again to clarify its expression. Among these entries, she developed the habit of making verse-notes, a discipline of observing and exploring, written at speed directly into the book. Occasionally she would draw on one of these entries to inform a poem, but most remain as they were first written – fresh, unguarded, illuminated by their own discovery. These are the majority of the pieces here.

The selection has not been an easy task. We wanted to show something of the range of her notebooks while hinting, without unnecessary duplication, at her working methods. Inevitably, there is some repetition of phrasing between the notebook and a number of the finished poems. We have included some examples of this (the barest minimum necessary) to illustrate the patterns of association and thought in the shaping process.

Apart from the very rare spelling error, no corrections have been made – except that where she used US spellings, they have been altered. Dates have also been put in, to mark the beginnings of new years. Nothing else has been tidied up, but much has been omitted.

AB, AdC 2001

Spring 1991

Metamorphoses

And so, spreading our wings, we become night

...

And so, flexing our toes, we become trees

And so, filling our lungs, we become wind/light

And so, stretching our limbs, we become light/wind

And so, rattling our bones, we become reeds/fire

And so, settling our bones, we become sleep

And waking we become all that we have loved

That spasm of remembering

We become the grasses of the field

And fear explodes in us like small pods

Scattering its seeds

Released me from my bones

From the grip of toes on the cold earth

From what the fingers must endure

And having gone one thousand times to the water’s edge

And found...

Table of contents

• Cover
• TITLE PAGE
• CONTENTS
• POEM
• EXTRACTS FROM THE NOTEBOOK
• FROM STONES TO STARS
• COPYRIGHT