Sunspots

Simon Barraclough (Poet in Residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory) is your guide to the Sun in this ambitious and energetic new collection of poems, fusing science and literature, and channelling Shakespeare, Byron, Nabokov and more.

The Sun is our neighbourhood star, igniting the imagination and setting the template for divinity. But in reality, it is crawling with sunspots of differing shapes, sizes, and power. Is the Sun a god, a man, a woman, or simply a giant ball of hydrogen? Why does it tell fibs about its favourite painters? Is the Sun afraid of dying? Does it get depressed? And what does it really think about us, and the solar system it is bound to care for? In Sunspots fact, fiction, horror, humour and joy are condensed into a powerful meditation on the star that gives us life.