The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
- Feb 4, 2025
- 2 min read
★★★★★
In seventh grade, we studied Greek mythology, about the same time I got a modest telescope for Christmas. I was obsessed with both. Years later, though I no longer had the telescope and hadn’t read about the Twelve Olympians in nearly three decades, I never forgot those tales, however dim their storylines may have become, nor stopped looking at the stars, even if it was mostly with the naked eye, and I was able to fuse those two childhood loves into a winery I co-founded—its name and the names and labels of its Estate wines. Years again later, though not nearly so many as before, we moved to the Flint Hills outside Manhattan, Kansas, where hikes in the prairie returned the gift of writing poetry that I had laid aside 25 years earlier. Older and, I’d like to think, wiser, my poetry now comes from a deeper place, full of awe and curiosity and reverence, often about the natural world, the world that surrounds me daily in all its dazzling, mysterious, infallible glory. Naturally, then, when I saw this book on the New Releases shelf at the library, I was going to bring it home straightaway.
Ostensibly the keepsake of an annual charitable event that celebrates the wonder of reality through the stories of science winged with poetry, The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder Through Science & Poetry is a delight and cannot but be a perfect encapsulation of its namesake festival. Beautifully assembled, elegantly designed (though it inexplicably breaks down in the last six pages; not that anyone other than obsessed designers like me would notice), and fantastically illustrated, The Universe in Verse could get by on looks alone. In Maria Popova’s capable hands, however, this book is equal brains and beauty, her science essays imparting as much wonder—and wisdom—as the poems. Each elevates the other. For anyone who thinks that a deeper understanding of science reduces wonder—kills the mystery as it were—this small but mighty collection will quickly dispel that notion. As Popova writes in the introduction, “Poetry and science — individually, but especially together — are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply. We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. Both are occupied with helping us discover something we did not know before — something about who we are and what this is. Their shared benediction is a wakefulness to reality aglow with wonder.”
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