The Messier Objects

Zand, Michael

ISBN 10: 184861456X / ISBN 13: 9781848614567

Published by Shearsman Books, 2015

About this Item

Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. An apparently unread copy in perfect condition. Dust cover is intact with no nicks or tears. Spine has no signs of creasing. Pages are clean and not marred by notes or folds of any kind.

Seller Inventory # rev4314928302

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Messier Objects
• Publisher: Shearsman Books
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 184861456X
• ISBN 13: 9781848614567
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Like New
• Weight: 145.1 grams

About this title

Synopsis

The Messier Objects are a catalogue of astronomical bodies discovered and published by Charles Messier in 1771. In this new collection of poems, Michael Zand re-frames these objects as totemic symbols that celebrate the creative and social diversity of the human experience. "The Messier Objects" are thus meditations on the colour and complexity of the universe, and a rejection of a perceived drift towards cultural polarisation, simplification and standardisation.

"In Michael Zand's latest book, the legendary clusters, galaxies and nebulae that Charles Messier 'mistook' for comets become ciphers for cultural and political adjustment, pleas for redirected looking. The mistake, Zand suggests, is only a mistake because thinking makes it so, and we need to see 'beyond the main sequences/of the regular stars.' Like all Zand's writing, a hesitant and fractured syntax is used to probe dislocation across discourses, from ongoing conflict in the Middle East, through climate change to - with tongue only partly in cheek - the squabbles that continue to dog British poetry. These are serious poems not without humour, and they are all the more humane for it." -Jeff Hilson

"If the universe is expanding, then these poems follow that expansion by enlarging the possibilities of language..." -Peter Jaeger