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 seventheenth-century Florence, Padua, Venice, Ostia, and Rome.

About the Author
George Keithley's award-winning epic poem The Donner Party was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and has been adapted as a play and an opera. He and his wife live in Chico, California.

Reviews
A notable event in poetry; an experiment that triumphantly succeeds.-X. J. Kennedy; ""A truly remarkable, and moving, series of poems.""-Jane Hirshfield; ""Stubborn, irascible, truth-obsessed, Galileo is a living presence, his Venice teeming with Carnevale, fearful of the Inquisition, vividly realized in The Starry Messenger.""-Daniel Hoffman; ""Keithley's talent is remarkable; he seems to possess Whitman's visionary imagination, that rare ability to evoke powerful, scaled-down, lyric details in the service of a vast structure.""-Joyce Carol Oates in The American Poetry Review



Book Information
ISBN 9780822958161
Author George Keithley
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint University of Pittsburgh Press
Publisher University of Pittsburgh Press