It’s safe to say that I’m a fan of poet and author Mary Soon Lee. I adored Elemental Haiku, her series of haiku based on each element of the period table. I also really enjoyed The Sign of the Dragon, a stunning epic fantasy poem sequence that’s well worth seeking out (and has recently been published in an illustrated version). And my three-part interview with her was fascinating, leading to a continuing and delightful sporadic correspondence over the past few years.
So, please take this review of her 2023 collection of poetry How To Navigate Our Universe with a pinch of salt. To add further seasoning, Mary herself arranged for a copy of her book to be sent to me, although not with any request for coverage on The Sciku Project. On finishing reading it, however, I decided I wanted to cover it anyway.
Salted or not, How To Navigate Our Universe is a joy.
Mary first mentioned the project to me in the third part of our interview, way back in 2019. Followers of her work (and those signed up to her newsletter) will have seen poems in the series trickling into the wild ever since.
Split over five parts, the collection comprises of 128 poems, the overwhelming majority of which are part of a ‘How To’ sequence, originally started from a prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Anodon and Martha Silano. The titles in the sequence are wonderful, ranging from ‘How to Mislay Constellations’ to ‘How to Tease Jupiter’ (my personal favourite).
Throughout, Mary’s poetic skills are on full display. For the most part these are brief affairs. Whilst there aren’t many haiku (more haiku please!) most are less than 30 lines long, and those lines are generally 5 words or less. What I’m trying to convey with this overly quantitative approach to poem length is that Mary manages to do a lot with remarkably little.
Of course, this should come as no surprise to fans of Elemental Haiku. In my review of that collection I said “Mary Soon Lee walks the balance between information and artistry perfectly. Her poems are graceful, humorous and fascinating, sometimes all three in a single haiku.”
Copy-and-paste.
Writing haiku teaches us many things, some more useful than others. Being able to say a lot with a little is the most valuable of them all. Being able to do so elegantly and include information, emotion, humour, narrative… well that’s the sign of a master of their craft.
So sure, there aren’t many haiku in the book, but the poems in How to Navigate Our Universe use the same poetic brevity that Mary demonstrated in Elemental Haiku. Indeed, some of these poems come across as chains of haiku, even though they aren’t.
Gravitationally collapse a nebula.
Fuse hydrogen into helium.
If desired, explode.
– How to be a Star
There are some wonderful turns of phrase. ‘How to Mislay Constellations’ starts with the couplet ‘Set them down carefully, // each star in its place,’. There’s nothing fancy about the lines but its precise sparseness conveys so much of the poem to come. Many of the poems are sequences of two-line stanzas like ‘How to Mislay Constellations’. It’s a form that compliments Mary’s style I think.
Breaking the couplet poems Mary shows she can handle other forms just as well. One of my favourite poems is dedicated to the memory of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, the British-American astronomer who in 1925 proposed that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. The poem, ‘How to Heed Hydrogen’, is a pantoum and it’s stunning, weaving its repeating lines around on themselves to celebrate a pioneering astronomer, her most famous achievement and the barriers and challenges faced by a female scientist.
‘How to Heed Hydrogen’ appears in Part IV which is titled ‘Pioneers’. Other famous (and not so famous) names receive poems alongside Payne-Gaposchkin, including Stephen Hawkins, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Galileo Galilei and Valentina Tereshkova (another lovely poem that balances achievement and feminism without taking anything away from Tereshkova herself).
Groundless, that first step
beneath the unblinking stars,
historic space walk.
– In memory of Alexei Leonov
[May 30, 1934 – October 11, 2019]
Only in the final, shortest part of the collection, Part V: Space Dust, does Soon Lee depart from the ‘How to’ formula. It’s a little jarring and makes the poems contained within feel like an afterthought. They aren’t and I can see why they’ve been included in this collection, but it’s a shame that they break from the cohesion of the previous 100+ poems.
As a collection, How to Navigate Our Universe is an overflowing trove of wonderful poems that intrigue and stimulate curiosity. There aren’t any notes to explain anything referenced in the poems but many times I’ve turned to the internet to discover more about something mentioned in a poem. You can feel Mary’s interest in the stars baked into the spine of this book, her fascination with space and the women and men who dream beyond our planet. The delightfully dreamy front cover helps too, the art by Mary’s own daughter Lucy Lee-Moore.
I might be biased but I can comfortably say that How to Navigate Our Universe is the best science-related poetry collection I’ve read in several years. It’s a remarkable achievement. Stellar even.
