"The Feynmann Challenge" by James Thornton (Barbican Press, 2017)

The writer's an environmental lawyer who did philosophy at Yale (along with some computer science, biology and literature). He's edited a university poetry magazine and has had poems published. Aware that his science knowledge isn't strong, he's consulted prof-level scientists. Nigel McLoughin (prof of creativity and poetics; Iota editor) edited the book. Sounds promising!

Most of the pieces are flash essays with meaningless line-breaks, eager to supply information, not hesitating to supply footnotes. "Like the Pompidou Centre, it wears all its working on the outside", writes Philip Gross, which is fine (I've described my poems that way. Maybe I got the phrase from him). But it's not just the info-dumping that reminds me of essays - the default mode of language is prosey too: e.g. -

• "Now half of all of us live in cities/ and by mid century three quarters./ While cities create culture and reduce/ the global footprint of our proliferating kind,/ with the towers mental illness also rises. .... The result of the experiment is/ simple and powerful: the nature/ walk quiets this brain area/ while the urban walk does not.".
• "So we may have found surviving Ediacarans/ who have quietly pursued their living/ for an extra five hundred million years/ alongside their more complex successors". This is the final verse of a two-page piece - no awe and wonder there.
• "These tiny, flimsy-/ armoured, pale and fragile arachnids/ have mouth parts, known in the business/ as chelicarae, shaped like forceps/ and fringed with comb-like teeth"
• "Ecologists are outlining how new roads/ can be laid for most benefit with least/ harm, preserving the natural systems/ we will always rely on" - another flat ending to a 2+ page poem.

It's a long book - over a 100 pages of poems. After 10 of them I was ready to bail out. Then came "The jaguar sometimes bites" which provided some science I didn't know - that jungle flocks can contains dozen of species. I like the plot of "The dead fish of Chad". "The rolling of the dungball" might be my favourite piece. I'm a sucker for poems like "Conquering Earth" that summarise human evolution, making analogies with modern life. There's little about perhaps the most counter-intuitive theories (Quantum theory) or the most beautiful (general relativity), or details about extreme accuracy (e.g. "At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to detect a change ... equivalent to ... the distance to the nearest star (some 4.2 light years away) to an accuracy smaller than the width of a human hair." - wikipedia).

Cutting it down to 5 poems plus a list of "interesting facts", then editing more ruthlessly (why "forty percent" rather than "40%"? Why "from two large numbers, both prime" rather than "from two large primes"?) might have resulted in a more interesting work.