A GREAT BLENDING OF SF POEM AND POEM OF SCIENCE

IRON ANGELS by Geoffrey Landis, ( Cleveland and Berlin CT; 2009,VanZero ) pb ISBN 978-0-9789244-7-8, $19.95, $15.00 if you order from the author directly at www.geoffreylandis.com/IronAngels.

Geoffrey is both a poet and a physicist, a combination that is not as rare as you might think.  He has been active as a sf/f/h poet before ASIMOV'S became the major professional showcase for sf poetry..  He has been able to blend two distinct types of poetry into one, the poem of science and the science fiction poem.  To refresh your memories, a poem of science is a poem about natural/scientific phenomena and/or the life of a scientist.while a science fiction poem is a narrative that uses the imagery and archetypes associated with science fiction.  I know it sounds like the basic mix for an ANALOGUE story but its harder to do in poetry than in prose.

Anyway this is a collection worth having.  Let me show by these two lines from the poem 'Search' which is about a young astronomer putting in the terribly long and endless hours in SETI research, the quest for extraterrestial intelligence.

'The telescope sends to him nothing but a string of numbers
His fingers are doing the scan..."

Landis very much a typical ANALOG writer, he is optimistic that knowledge ultimately leads to a better society.

This paragraph from the poem 'Into the Cool Cyberspace' in the collection sums up his work as a poet

"Our robots precede us
With infinite diversity
Exploring the universe
Delighting incomplexity.'

Anyway its a collection worth having.  Buy it.