STARRY NIGHT: Astronomers and Poets Read the Sky

David Levy, STARRY NIGHT: Astronomers and Poets Read the Sky

Astronomer Levy (author of last year's Shoemaker by Levy) is best known as the co-discoverer of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which slammed into Jupiter in 1994. This diminutive book brings together poems that mention the night sky, photographs of astronomical objects and Levy's musings on how comets, astronomical conjunctions and contemporary scientific paradigm shifts influenced poets through the ages. Levy dates the writing of poems like Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and Gerard Manley Hopkins's "I am like a slip of comet" to demonstrate convincingly how astronomical references are made to specific comets—which, until recent centuries, were regarded as heavenly portents as they burst across the relatively unchanging night sky—that these poets must have seen. This is a very personal volume, reflecting Levy's favorite authors; yet it must be said that Levy's interest in poetry hasn't progressed much beyond his youthful, rather conservative, enthusiasms—Milton, Tennyson (though the chapter on In Memoriam is particularly fine), Thoreau and Frost. Walt Whitman's Shakespearean and very pertinent "Year of meteors! brooding year!" is conspicuously absent. The space Levy devotes in the last chapter to Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 would have been better allocated to some 20th-century poets who explored unknown regions of poetic discourse in their musings on the heavens: Hart Crane, for example, in the "Cape Hatteras" section of The Bridge, or W.H. Auden's seminal "Out on the lawn I lie in bed/ Vega conspicuous overhead." Taken on its merits, this engaging little album can be recommended for an enjoyable few hours of bedtime reading, with perhaps a stroll out under the stars afterward to marvel at the grandeur of the heavens. Illus. (Mar.)

Forecast: This attractive little volume is the perfect gift for all starstruck poetry lovers. It should sell nicely now and in the future.

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Reviewed on: 02/26/2001

Genre: Nonfiction

Open Ebook - 203 pages - 978-1-61592-434-9