Rhyme & reason
Poetry is an inexact science but you’ll need clarity and precision to impress in this month’s open competition, says judge Alison Chisholm
Alison Chisholm
This year we celebrate 150 years since the birth of Marie Curie, the Warsaw-born physicist who changed the face of science through her work on radioactivity. The first woman to win a Nobel prize, she discovered the elements polonium and radium; and to this day a charity that supports sufferers from terminal illness bears her name.
It’s easy to assume that science and poetry are poles apart, until you think of the naturalist and physician Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) who wrote on natural science in rhyming couplets, of Dannie Abse, whose work as a chest specialist ran alongside his poetry output, or of chemist Sir Humphry Davy (yes, inventor of the lamp), whose poetry was so admired by Wordsworth and Coleridge that he was invited to edit the second edition of their Lyrical Ballads.