Losing Galileo

I like to imagine Galileo,
his heart swinging like
a chandelier, watching

the stones free-fall, this
tiny world growing larger
with each thought. I like to

imagine an outline
of a new idea sending the earth
spinning round the sun,

I like to imagine him
turning a Tuscan night-sky
over in his hand, high up

in the leaning tower. I like
to imagine his name as a poem
folded inside itself, Galileo

Galilei – but yet it moves –
400 years on, someone
voted to pack up constellations

of people, unscrew each lightbulb
star, dismantle those tin-foiled
friendly ghosts that float above

telling us where we are inside
our flickering darkness. I hate
to imagine how they will wink

in someone else’s back garden,
while we, dull as pebbles, will
lie at the bottom of night’s pitch.

Stasis from misunderstanding.
A country in terminal velocity.
Without Galileo, without others

we are only a clouded thought-
experiment that can’t imagine
anything 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 in which two spheres, sharing the same volume but different in mass, were dropped 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 thought-experiments – 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.

• This article was corrected on 30 November to make clear the two spheres in the Galileo experiment cited were different in mass rather than volume.