Onboard Diary

Poetics for cosmonauts

I hardly ever buy books for one reason: I've got hundreds of them at home but I have no time to read, so I feel stupid buying objects that will be stored on shelves. That's why whenever I search around the piles of books in bookstores I do it with a collector's ardour, trying to find that undiscovered precious piece of work. That rare edition or that small poetry collection you've never heard about, with just a few pages, which becomes one of the treasures of your private library. Finding those prizes is the only motivation that keeps me searching from time to time.

Today B. and I entered a bookstore. As soon as I stepped on the red floor I told myself: I'm going to find a book about astronauts.

I said that to myself for many reasons, but especially because of the emptiness. Because lately a spatial-emptiness surrounds me. An emptiness of 0 degrees. Soundless. Warm in a way, but terribly confusing. It was an innocent wish, almost stupid. A sparkle of something that could fill that emptiness.

I looked over the piles. One, two, four, six books. Then I read the word cosmonaut. I turned my head and I read the entire title: Poetics for Cosmonauts.
I smiled. I bought the book as if I had gone there looking for something specific and found it. And I went back home feeling sure that I had found some breath which would help me escape from that bubble. Right like that, as if it were that easy.

German text on the picture: Does this middle-age painting show Cosmonauts in their Spaceships?

But "Poetics for Cosmonauts" is not just that breath. Actually it's just what I wanted to read, even if I was not aware of it. It's like some space-scrap to cling to when going adrift. It's some light in the middle of the night. It's like one of those happiness-pills.

Thanks Henry Pierrot.

12 degrees and increasing...

Tribute to Stanislav Lem and the last contribution to Solaristic, in "Poetics for Cosmonauts" Henry Pierrot explores the frontiers between poetry and narrative. The result is a collection of poems that joins condensation and transparency, maintaining a degree of unity from the very first verse to the last one that not everybody manages to achieved."

Henry Pierrot (a.k.a Henry Pathè) is born in 1956 in Chevry-Cossigny (France). Student of Roland Barthes a the Professional Superior School, he completes his PHD with honours at La Sorbone. In 1989, after some years as lecturer of French at the University of Barcelona, he moves to Houston University as lecturer of French Literature. In 1993 he joins the project "Aesthetics of the Universe", a project that aims to create an aesthetics maps of the galaxies. The poems collected in the present work are part of that research.