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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Praise for Sunspots
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
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Reviews
Throughout human history, the Earth’s parent star has been an object of fascination, study, myth-making and worship. In Sunspots, Simon Barraclough explores these various identities through poetry, deftly juggling science and art … Accessible as well as erudite.
Barraclough mixes the astronomical and the casual, his deep interest in science and sense of humour shining through … Full of energy and wild dangers.
Anja Konig, Sabotage Reviews
In poems that pop and flare with energy, Barraclough images an inner life for our ‘neighbourhood star’, a ‘nice little solo career’ apart from the ‘prog-rock’ density of the universe, musing on its favourite painters and its fear of death like a solar psychotherapist.
Poetry Book Society Bulletin
This is a cosmic long view of a book… [It] weaves between playful, sardonic, grim, romantic and whimsical. Many poems are written in the Sun’s own voice, like that of a casual, gossiping hairdresser – although deceivingly. The Sun contains multitudes. At times, the voice comes across as feminine, other times masculine, even others as a distant and detached ball of fire.
Miranda Barnes, Magma