Poem of the week: Losing Galileo by Olga Dermott-Bond
Losing Galileo
I like to imagine Galileo,his heart swinging likea chandelier, watching
the stones free-fall, thistiny world growing largerwith each thought. I like to
imagine an outlineof a new idea sending the earthspinning round the sun,
I like to imagine himturning a Tuscan night-skyover in his hand, high up
in the leaning tower. I like to imagine his name as a poemfolded inside itself, Galileo
Galilei – but yet it moves – 400 years on, someonevoted to pack up constellations
of people, unscrew each lightbulbstar, dismantle those tinfoiledfriendly ghosts that float above
telling us where we are insideour flickering darkness. I hateto imagine how they will wink
in someone else’s back garden,while we, dull as pebbles, willlie at the bottom of night’s pitch.
Stasis from misunderstanding.A country in terminal velocity.Without Galileo, without others
we are only a clouded thoughtexperiment that can’t imagineanything better than this.
This week’s poem is from the lively first collection, Frieze, by the poet and fiction writer Olga Dermott-Bond. Contemporary poetry often favours the personal and confrontational, a gutsy convention-mockery that is attractive but risks becoming the default setting for new poets. Dermott-Bond’s work plays with elements of that voice, and makes it sound fresh. Impressive technical skill underlies her informal, sometimes improvisational stylishness, and serves her ambitious political and historical vision. Losing Galileo is a poem that tests the present against a historical touchstone. It takes on more than you might first think.
It starts off with the structural support of the reader-friendly, workshoppy pattern of the poetry list, a set of inventive variations on the theme, “I like to imagine …” It’s a device that enables the poet to make the remote and august figure of Galileo present to the reader’s imagination, avoiding any temptation to deliver a set of dutiful research notes. This is where the benefits of the personalised, perhaps feminised, tone are felt. We might think we know all about Galileo, or we might (God forbid) think who cares any more about old Galileo, but we’re drawn in. The poem’s structure, both the listing technique and the short-lined triplet form, favours brevity. The poet seizes her opportunity to snap up a few nourishing biographical details and treat us to some compressed highly charged and unexpected images – with added energy from verbs such as “swinging”, “growing” “sending”, “spinning”.
When a young medical student, Galileo noticed a chandelier moving in response to different air currents, and realised it took the same amount of time to swing back and forth, no matter how wide the arc. After trying this at home by means of two pendulums, he decided to switch studies from medicine to maths. The poem makes the excitement of the discovery central, and connects it to another experiment, which involved dropping stones/spheres of the same size but different volume from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
It’s not that the scientific details are insignificant for the poem, but that the text is not required to provide or explain them. The reader bears the responsibility. The poet is more interested in the intellectual excitement, “this / tiny world growing larger with each thought”. She lives Galileo’s life in microcosm, as if in a series of nerve impulses, ceasing finally on a full-stop in line 13 (after “leaning tower”).
Verse five presents the last and freshest of the speaker’s favourite imaginings: “his name as a poem / folded inside itself, Galileo // Galilei”. Subsequently, Galileo’s alleged comment about the Earth, (muttered under his breath after recanting his heliocentric theory before the Roman Inquisition) “but yet it moves” is skilfully placed. Framed by dashes, it moves the poem into the contemporary scene, “400 years on”.
Now the absence of Galileo is evoked in terms of loss of community, “constellations // of people” and astronomical enlightenment, “each lightbulb / star”. The enjambment, always unexpected, creates its own lightbulb moment. Dermott-Bond then reverts to her earlier trope, recasting it as the emphatic “I hate / to imagine …”
And although it’s used only once, the phrase sets off a compelling vision of intellectual decline which culminates in a collective coma, where we “we, dull as pebbles, will / lie at the bottom of night’s pitch”.
A brisk endnote tells us that “Britain left the EU Galileo satellite programme following Brexit, 2020.” The reference to a self-imposed isolation from scientific ideas adds an important dimension to the poem. But Losing Galileo evokes more than one act of suicide, and perhaps more than one nation’s pathetic imitation of a stone falling from a tower, “[a] country in terminal velocity”. Galileo’s ideas were sometimes interpreted merely as thoughtexperiments – and that’s all they were until they were multiply tested and verified. Dermott-Bond might be viewing the end of human existence when she writes, “without Galileo, without others // we are only a cloud”. Contrasting the “stasis” of ignorance with the combined powers of science and imagination, Losing Galileo sheds an important light on our increasingly cloddish, scrappy times.
other stuff comes up as well, family life for example. We’ve got to know each other very well to the point where we are planning to visit each other – he lives in Kenya. We have changed each other’s businesses and lives.”
As with any other type of partnership, however, there is plenty of scope for things to go wrong. On this,
I can speak from personal experience. A few years ago, while researching a magazine feature, I joined an online life-coaching community. We were each paired with a partner to support us through the “transformational journey”. Every Monday, at 5pm, I had an hour-long call with a woman in California to discuss our progress on that week’s exercises. Trouble was, she was going through an angry divorce and mostly wanted to vent about that and her disappointing real estate career. I was too polite on the first call to set any boundaries or ground rules and only got 15 minutes to share details of my week. She was an aspiring magazine writer, and in subsequent calls, kept ranting at me: “It’s all right for YOU, you’ve already got a great job,” which wasn’t helpful.” I’m not proud of this but in the end, I tiptoed quietly away, from the group and from her increasingly furious emails.
This scenario is precisely why experts suggest you embark on such arrangements with an initial trial period and always set an end point for how long your partnership will last. “You can say, let’s try this out and see if it works,” suggests Reading. “That way you can find out what it is you really need, and be clear and honest about swiftly calling a halt if it isn’t working.”
Working successfully with a buddy rests as much with thinking about what you can offer the other person as what they can give you. “We ideally want to work with someone compassionate and non-judgmental who is trustworthy and is genuinely interested in our success,” says Reading. “But we must also be willing to offer that to them.”