Dung Beetles Navigate by Starlight

These poems explore the boundary between science and poetry, and juxtapose the lexicon of organic chemistry, in particular, with a bo- tanical discourse which is more conventional in poetry, but which the scienti c treatment defamiliarises. Far from being abstruse and heavy, the treatment here lightens the subject with an imaginative playfulness, as in ‘The First Green Human: The Observer Interviews Clorinda’, where Marvell’s pastoral character is turned, through a journalistic register, into a personi cation of current ecological concerns.