Overview

The Sun is our neighbourhood star, igniting the imagination and setting the template for divinity. But in reality, it is crawling with sunspots of differing shapes, sizes, and power. Simon Barraclough (Poet in Residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory) is your guide to the Sun in this ambitious and energetic new collection of poems, fusing science and literature, and channelling Shakespeare, Byron, Nabokov and more. Is the Sun a god, a man, a woman, or simply a giant ball of hydrogen? Why does it tell fibs about its favourite painters? Is the Sun afraid of dying? Does it get depressed? And what does it really think about us, and the solar system it is bound to care for? In Sunspots fact, fiction, horror, humour and joy are condensed into a powerful meditation on the star that gives us life.

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9781908058416

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Reviews

Simon Barraclough illuminates solar science with a poet's gaze. His words conjure the epic journey of a photon from the Sun's heart to the retina of the eye, the blaze of sunshine in a Van Gogh canvas or the daily slide of shadows over Stonehenge and Manhattan. Sunspots is a love letter from the third planet to its parent star. DR MAREK KUKULA PUBLIC ASTRONOMER, ROYAL OBSERVATORY GREENWICH

"""This is a cosmic long view of a book... [It] weaves between playful, sardonic, grim, romantic and whimsical."" MAGMA"

This is a cosmic long view of a book... [It] weaves between playful, sardonic, grim, romantic and whimsical. MAGMA

Author Information

Simon Barraclough is originally from Yorkshire and has lived in London since 1997. His debut collection, Los Alamos Mon Amour was a Forward Prize finalist in 2008. In 2010 he published a pamphlet of commissioned poems, Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins) and his second full collection Neptune Blue (Salt Publishing) followed in 2011. Simon has collaborated with artists and writers on a number of events and publications including Psycho Poetica (Editor, Sidekick Books 2012) and The Debris Field (with Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe, Sidekick Books 2013). He has contributed regularly to BBC Radio's The Verb and The Film Programme, as well as to The Long View. In 2014, Simon was writer in residence at UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey. He is very excited about our neighbourhood star.

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