Orrery
Описание книги
Orrery is a collection that orbits around the theme of Pioneer 10, an American space probe launched in 1972 to study Jupiter’s moons. Having achieved many firsts before reaching Jupiter and a few more after being hurled away from the solar system, the probe was retired in 2003 when NASA stopped sending signals to it, leaving it to wander alone through deep space. On a trajectory that may long outlast Earth, Pioneer has transformed from a finite object into an infinite one, a muddling of the mundane and the sublime, of mortality and immortality, that is echoed throughout the collection: “I could have been a dancer, a stunt double, / and you, Pioneer 10, a pop can, a pie plate, / a gear driving the orrery of all you sail beyond.” Inhabiting the perceived imaginative and philosophical space of the probe, Kane’s poems ignite a radical empathy in which human beings, caterpillars, stars, animal bones and other hunks of the material stuff of the universe are seen to share a common condition. Exploring ideas of materiality, consciousness, transformation and space travel, Orrery is as exquisite as its namesake, a compact vision of our world that helps us to orient ourselves in time and space, inspiring wonder.
Оглавление
Donna Kane. Orrery
Table of Contents
I
Oh Be a Fine Girl, Kiss Me
March 2, 1972, Forecast for Northern BC
Dear Pioneer 10
Letter to the Scientists at the Ames Research Center
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot
Depiction of a Man and a Woman on the Pioneer 10 Space Probe Plaque
The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You
Pioneer 10, I Hear You
Pioneer 10 Parsed
Eulogy for Analog
January 22, 2003, or. the Day NASA Sent Its Last Official Signal to Pioneer 10
Space Shuttle Columbia
Microraptor gui
Pioneer 10 Instruments
1. Geiger Tube Telescope
2. Ultraviolet Photometer
3. Imaging Photopolarimeter
4. Meteoroid Detectors
5. Sisyphus Asteroid / Meteoroid Detector
6. Helium Vector Magnetometer
7. Quadrispherical Plasma Analyzer
8. Charged Particle Instrument
9. Trapped Radiation Detector
10. Cosmic Ray Telescope
11. Infrared Radiometer
P.S
On the Material World
II
Ascension
Vancouver, August 2018
To Us
Autumn
Probability
Museums of Natural History
Opposable Thumb
Epiphenomenalism
Blizzard
Ghost Off the Coast of Sandspit, October 27, 2012
Resonant Frequency
Phone Survey
Bitten
The Abyss
Grounded
Magpies
Visitation
What If Nostalgia Is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End
Breastbone
III
April
Consciousness
Consciousness II
Fault Lines
Fungus Love
Slinky
Tasseography
Aubade
Intrusions
Absorption III
On the Dilemma of Mind and Body
Heron and Fish
Horse Chestnut
The Measurer, the Measuring Device and the Thing Being Measured
On Closed Systems
Snow Day
Antlers
Medium
Large Blue
Whistling Thorn
Nomenclature
Acknowledgements
Bio
Отрывок из книги
Each year, the Earth diminishes by one one-hundredth of a human blood cell, the moon moves four centimetres away. The distance between me and the International Space Station is less than between my deck and Prince George. You can tell it’s a space station by the way it glides, a silver bead skimming its equation eastward. A faint echo, it’s true—but real nonetheless— of the deer, caught in my headlights then arcing away, my 25 trillion blood cells seized in Surprise! Surprise!
I’d rather feel the heft of a photographic plate, watch silver salts precipitate the split light of stars, spectral bands confessing the gas and ore of my glittering valves and ventricles. I can’t say what goes on in my sleep, but when I wake? My mind reaches out, not inward, for its bearings. As if whatever grounds me draws from a great distance.
.....
You were the first human-built object to pass through the asteroid belt. That’s something to be proud of, no?
We realize you are in deep space and the next star in your trajectory is a two-million-year journey, but we feel the loneliness is ours. As they say, To be is to be perceived.
.....