The Universe in Verse is Antidotal
adventures in bookselling and a book of the year, among many books of the year
(Note: All internal links will lead you to my Substack thoughts about these books, their magic, and what they taught me, not to mention occasional prompts and at least one PodCraft.)
On a deeply wintry afternoon, at Main Point Books, my beloved neighborhood indie, I was pairing books with people. The Safekeep (Yael Van Der Wouden), I whispered, toward one in search of something as intense and insular as The Goldfinch. Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places for a nature-attuned single mom struggling with sadness (though I might have equally suggested Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers). Dorthe Nors’s A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast for an armchair traveler. (Chasing Fog, by Laura Pashby, would have been a wonderful fit as well.) Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was out of stock, so was Held (Anne Michaels), but I came close to selling Hua Hsu’s perfect memoir of friendship and loss, Stay True, close to selling Claire Keegan, and there was a lovely young woman who chose, in the end, News of the World (Paulette Jiles) to give to a father she is working hard to know. I wish that the great Agnes Martin monograph was in stock, to share with a woman who seemed inclined to meet such a soulful artist. I wish I’d thought to look for the newest edition of Best American Essays on behalf of a woman who seemed to love all the books I love. I wish I’d remembered to suggest Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, because every one of us is in perpetual need of a Stegner read. And if anyone had asked me which memoir made me want to write memoir in the first place I would have said (as you all know by now) Road Song by Natalie Kusz.
A friend was volunteering with me. The lines were long. I felt like a character in Evan Friss’s (truly fine) The Bookshop. I felt that pattering of hope that good books, and our continuing desire for them, yield.
Yield. Always more yield. And so, today, my recommendation for you: The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder Through Science & Poetry (Maria Popova, illustrations by Ofra Amit). “We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms,” Popova writes, at the start of this slim and potent volume, “and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other.”
Popova takes us on a journey into the eruption of flowers and the idea of entropy, the truth of universal geometries and the search for dark matter. She introduces us to scientists who are led by awe, who work through cancer and discrimination, who falter and then break through. Popova’s essays are exquisite proofs of the power of human ingenuity and literary compression. Her history of science is Will Dowd-like in its simple presentation of complex ideas, its surprising biographical reveals, its pleasing, lyrical symmetries, its naming of old things in new ways. Her pairing of poems with the science she decodes is proof of her crystalline thesis, that science and poetry are a “shared benediction,” “a wakefulness to reality aglow with wonder."
At the end of this year, we are battered by headlines, by social media feeds and brands, by threats and obeisance, by surprise insinuations (the Panama Canal?). We are deafened by the noise, ratcheted by the fear, struggling to find our own ways to pay attention and take care. The Universe in Verse is pure and purely antidotal. It is miracle and matter. Our pale blue dot. Our indomitable questing. Our far, far, far better angel selves.
What a fun volunteer gig. Was a bookseller for twenty years. Lots of titles to add to my TBR pile!
"We are deafened by the noise," yes. And it is awful. Yet in the quiet of morning (or afternoon, or evening), we can calm our spirits with books! Thank you for these suggestions, Beth!