Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe reissued as a Carcanet Classic. A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer, she confronted her early death. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer; her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. `Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination,’ she wrote. Her poems, like her researches, build imaginative inferences and speculations, setting out from observation, undeterred by knowing how little we can know.

The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars.Western literary study flows out of eighteenth-century works by Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Denis Diderot, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. Experience the birth of the modern novel, or compare the development of language using dictionaries and grammar discourses. ++++The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++British LibraryT100943'The contrast' is by Mrs. Ann Berkeley. Edited by Sir Adam Gordon, Bart.London: printed for John Stockdale, 1791. 2v.; 12

Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre Prize This sharp and unpredictable collection opens in the Cold War. Berkeley's father was a V-bomber navigator, a conflicted inheritance of pride and guilt which informs the opening poems. While parents struggle to keep life normal, the secrecies and occluded horrors of the period play out in vividly imagined children's games. One locus of memory is a ruined mansion, sliced into many apartments, through which the adult narrator looks back on the past unsure of what really happened, only that the child did not understand. The second part of the book develops the theme of shared humanity from the Warsaw fishermen of the title poem to a hi-tech dystopia of the near future, by way of a dissolute Norwegian, a traduced Baudelaire, a contemporary woodwose, and a petrolhead on the A1M. The array of voices - boastful, baffled, sardonic - employs Berkeley's experience as a poetry performer with The Joy of Six. In poems that frequently wrongfoot the reader, the Empire shrinks to an opera audience, the Royal Family is reduced to waxworks, and Cambridge finally gets its ecological mass transportation system. Obliquely political, this debut collection takes a sideways look at modern England.