"A responsibility to awe" by Rebecca Elson (Carcanet, 2001)

Poems from Acumen, Orbis, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Chicago, Rialto, etc. - about 50 pages of selected poems followed by about 80 pages from her notebooks (with crossings-out and alternatives) and about 11 pages of autobiography. She was a Cambridge astronomer who died in 1999 aged 39 - "We astronomers are nomads./ Merchants, circus people,/ All the earth our tent".

Quite a few of the poems are short and short-lined. I like "When you wish upon a star", "Aberration", "Salmon Running" - all no longer than they need to be. And I liked "Like Eels to the Sargasso Sea". Seeing "What if there was no moon" embarrassed me, because I've written a piece called "If there was no moon" with similar content.

"OncoMouse, Kitchen Mouse" ends with "Cozy up behind my fridge/ But watch out for the trap,/ The why-me box.// Once you've started in/ It snaps you shut."

Some of the best lines/fragments are in the notebook section (edited by Anne Berkeley and Angelo di Cintio). I've edited some of them further -

• Evening, and the air fills with darkness, and the darkness with moths, and the moths with motion, and you wonder how you came to be here.
• They go on talking in the downstairs room. I listen to them as if I had died, as if I'm only a memory to them now. Accept everything - to be a memory, visiting like sunshine on a January day, hard, brilliant, glittering.
• Creation - The Universe split/ And spreading/ Like a stain
• Dark Matter II - Like the thing you were about to say// The thing that pulls you to a certain room/ And leaves you standing, mystified
• Tomorrow is one of the days/ I have left to live
• Like going upstream on stepping stones/ You don't really know the meaning of river
• These small cells/ Lighting their fires/ In the Aladdins caves/ Of your bones
• Not content with what we can see,/ We go searching for what we can't/ Waving nets in thin air// Not much to say/ Most already said.

Multi-page poems in the notebook section - "Santa Cruz" for example - are unlike any in the earlier section. The Grafton centre and some other local features are mentioned.