Oor Big Braw Cosmos

There’s a good chance that this astronomy book – to quote one of the featured poems by co-author Rab Wilson – is “Gaun bauldly whaur nae man hus gaen afore!”

Partly, it’s a sober introduction to the Solar System, the large-scale structure of the cosmos, and how our ideas about space have evolved in the last few thousand years. Given that co-author John C Brown is the current Astronomer Royal for Scotland, there’s a quite deliberate bias towards the country’s contribution – “despite [its] overly maligned but nonetheless rather cloudy weather”.

The astronomy-inspired poetry is somewhat more radical; although Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, in her introduction, suggests there’s more of this around than you might think, the book’s title alone underscores its unique selling point – the poetry is written in Scots, without even the safety net of a glossary (the authors do suggest a useful online dictionary if English is your sole language).

Brown’s contribution is lucid, detailed and comprehensive, if a tad stylistically passive — when discussing the Moon landing in 1969, for example, he writes that Apollo 11’s lunar module (LM) “safely delivered the first humans […] to the Moon” rather than a more pro-active description of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin piloting the LM to the Moon. In contrast, Wilson’s poetry is colourful, enthusiastic, and questioning.

This does feel like a genuinely Scottish astronomy book, albeit informed by the spirit of Jekyll and Hyde. You’ll potentially learn a lot, but it undoubtedly does takes some getting used to.

Paul F Cockburn is an astronomy and science journalist