Pocket Horizon

A ‘pocket horizon’ is an instrument for navigation: a small, smooth, darkened glass providing a reflective surface from which to take one’s bearings when the true horizon cannot be seen. In this anthology, an array of objects from the history of science and medicine serve as points of navigation for the seven contributors (Richard Barnett, Mick Delap, Malene Engelund, Lorraine Mariner, Dominic McLoughlin, Kelley Swain and Sarah Westcott), who worked with leading poet and editor Don Paterson to refine and develop the poems collected here.

The objects, originally found in the Whipple Museum, Cambridge and Wellcome Collection, London, include horses’ teeth, a clockwork orrery depicting the universe, fragile hand-made glass fungi, and the prism used by Newton in his ‘Crucial Experiment’. A parade of amputees marches the reader past a case full of artificial limbs, one of the first clocks in Britain tolls the hour, a wave machine immerses us in the currents of human love, and votive models murmur questions from the past. The poems bring out the stories and histories behind these remarkable items, and are paired with original artwork by renowned illustrator Cassie Herschel-Shorland. Pocket Horizon is a book of excursions into the human mind and body, and the story of a world we feel compelled to map.