Science Made Marvellous

On August 17th, in conjunction with National Science Week, the Australian Poet's Union launched the Science Made Marvellous Books. These are three separate volumes of science poems: Law & Impulse – Maths and Chemistry Poems; Holding Patterns – Physics and Engineering poems; Earthly Matters - Biology and Geology Poems. I've got poems in two of these anthologies - "Six Flavours of Quark" (reproduced below) in Holding Patterns and "10 digits of e" in Law & Impulse, and therefore, am able to offer the books as a free download until the 30th of November. Just right click on the titles above, and click on "save link as..." or you can open them by clicking on them and save from there if you want. 

The books are superbly done with thought provoking poetry by some of the country's best poets (there wasn't a single poem in any of the three collections that I didn't love), so do please get your free copies while you can and enjoy science in its most novel and beautiful form.


Six Flavours of Quark

Up, down
strange, charmed
bottom and top,
that’s the six.
You know them; mapped them; found them when no one
else even thought to look.

I see them lined in pretty rows
well, not see as such
too small to see
but it’s almost like seeing.

The sweet reds; sticky greens; cooling blues.
like Italian ices I would lick
quick
as a kid
tongue stained to match.

Their imaginary flavours
conjure childhood
goggle eyed
against something entirely new
unfathomably rich
impossibly sophisticated.

There’s something decadent
in being given a choice
something sexy, even
in giving a mundane, elementary particle
such sensual connotations.