Bouncing between them

[larryhammer]

Tag-team reading can produce interesting effects. Normally I wouldn't expect a chicklitty corporate fantasy and a thumping chanson de geste (I adore the horses' expressions on that cover. Adore. They are the world's most dubious equines. With perms!) to play well together, but Aymeri's battles with Moors and Katie's against industrial espionage ping nicely off each other. Unexpected, that.

OTOH, Imagination's Other Place goes well with neither. The subtitle claims this is Poems of Science and Mathematics compiled by Helen Plotz. It's actually a stunning gallimaufry of verse: a few bits good, many banal, and all too much bathetic.

Behold within our Hayden Planetarium
More stars than there are fish in the aquarium

begins a straight-faced Ode to that institution by one Authur Guiterman. Undistinguished A.E. Housman is followed by dreadful Carl Sandburg, followed in turn by a limerick about a young man from Trinity. More odes to Newton and Einstein than you can shake a pentameter at. And then there's an extract of W.H. Mallock's translation of Lucretius into rubaiyat stanzas.

Pause to let sovay and dancinghorse shudder at the thought.

Its flavor can be adequately conveyed with the last stanza:

Oh Science, lift aloud thy voice that stills
The pulse of fear, and through the conscience thrills--
    Thrills through the conscience the news of peace--
How beautiful thy feet are on the hills!

I am in awe that not just the translator but the editor thought this was a good idea. Just not the good sort of awe.

---L.