A PLANET IS A POEM

A tour of the solar system in prose, poetry, and prosody.

Atop Averill’s dramatic, impressionistic views of solar explosions, gas giants floating on starry backdrops, and craggy planetary landscapes, Lewis floats 14 poems in as many forms, each on a gatefold flap concealing general descriptions of both the poem’s type and subject. The tour kicks off with “A Sonnet for the Solar System” (“A family made of many complex parts, / Our solar system’s great adventure starts”), an analysis of the typical metrics and structure of a Shakespearean sonnet, and an overview of our solar neighborhood from the sun to the Oort Cloud. From there on, Venus, for example, gets a villanelle, Saturn a sestina, Jupiter’s striped disk is filled with a round concrete poem, and the Kuiper Belt (“a belted donut salsa on stormy seas”) a “prose poem,” recognizable as such by a preponderance of images and metaphors. “Scientists,” she writes, “use metaphors all the time to help us understand what’s in our universe.” In both prose and hip-hop–style verse, she closes with invitations to “future astronomers” and other readers to keep the outward flight going. The poems show clearer signs of deliberate composition than inspiration, and the factual payload (mostly, the author acknowledges, drawn from a single NASA website) is relatively light; still, budding wordsmiths and skywatchers alike will find the ride worth taking.

Occupies both scientific and literary orbits, ably if not incandescently.