From a writer who stunned me by writing a world I knew so well to one who stunned me by allowing me to enter a world I assumed closed to me. This entry comes from a book of poetry, but it is a piece of prose, included at the end of the collection. Reading Elson was the first time I had ever witnessed a mind spanning the two worlds of art and science: she was both brilliant astrophysicist and stunning poet. Until then my own, limited little mind had assumed you could only do one or the other. Like here, is the ‘enterprise’ she speaks of her poetry or her research? “There are times when the enterprise seems mechanical, when the constraint to pursue the truth seems to suffocate the imagination.” As it says in the blurb on the back of the book, the extracts from her notebooks record the ways in which she refined her understanding of “The known human forces, love & hunger, fear and hope.” This extract allows a glimpse into her backstory, how such a mind was developed and what we can learn from it.
Included in A Responsibility to Awe, Oxford Poets, 2001
A Personal Anthology 