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The starry messenger / George Keithley.

Van Pelt Library PS3561.E378 S77 2003
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LIBRA - Special PS3561.E378 S77 2003
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Format:
Book
Author/Creator:
Keithley, George, 1935-
Contributor:
Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)
Series:
Pitt poetry series
Language:
English
Subjects (All):
American poetry.
Penn Provenance:
Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)
Physical Description:
72 pages ; 23 cm.
Place of Publication:
Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2003]
Summary:
The poems in The Starry Messenger explore the many facets of Galileo Galilei's life and times -- his troubled childhood, his appetites and love affairs, his early scientific discoveries, his famed exploration of the heavens, his house arrest, his blindness.
Emphasizing Galileo's independent nature and his affection for his mistress and daughter, George Keithley provides one of the most personal portraits of the astronomer ever written. In the process, he depicts the sensuous world of religion, magic, and science that was seventeenth-century Florence, Padua, Venice, Ostia, and Rome.
Contents:
I Passion
1. The Astronomer's Childhood and Early Youth 3
2. Ambition 6
3. Portrait of Galileo as a Young Man 8
4. Desire 11
5. Charting the Planets 12
6. His Fondness for Animals, His Fear of Pain, His Fabulous Appetite 14
7. Writing in Her Diary, His Daughter Welcomes the First Spring Rain Falling in the Hills 16
8. The Whispering City 17
9. Venice: The Morning Market Opens 19
10. Wary of Rome 20
II Vision
11. What the Mind's Eye Sees 23
12. Tintoretto 26
13. Adriatic Evening 28
14. Stellar Dominions 29
15. What Monsters 31
III Interlude
16. The Black Death Visits Venice 35
17. In the Monastery Garden 37
18. Herons 38
19. The Madonna of Purgatory 39
20. Carnevale 40
IV An Unquiet Mind
21. Galileo Visits His Mistress while Her Son Sleeps, Dreaming of His Own Death 47
22. Six Fragments from Johannes Kepler's Last Letter to Galileo 50
23. Authority 53
24. Galileo Speaks with God on a Midsummer Night of Shimmering Stars 55
25. Heresy 57
26. The Power of Suggestion 60
27. A Cautionary Tour of the Cellar Chamber 61
28. On Trial 65
29. Upon Learning His Appeal for a Pardon Is Denied 68
30. The Death of Galileo 69.
ISBN:
0822958163
OCLC:
51610542

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