![]() Galileo, firmly in Copernicus' camp with regard to the Sun being the centre of the solar system was alleged to have said "eppur si muovi", which translates as "And yet it moves". Psalm 104:5 states "the Lord set the earth on its foundations it can never be moved"Įcclesiastes 1:5 says "And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place" Psalm 93:1, 96:10 and 1 Chronicles 16:30 state that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved". In the Bible, there are a number of passages relating to the planet Earth and its position in the universe. This science t-shirt features a quote from the famous and tragic "father of modern physics" Galileo Galilei. By concluding with Galileo’s discoveries, Gallagher suggests that cosmology enjoyed a new birth too, whereby we understood that the Earth itself is moving-an adjective that we like to apply to poetry as well.Looking for a Galileo t-shirt? Look no further! Ranging among the lives and work of figures as diverse as Petrarch, Cosimo de’ Medici, Savonarola and Vittoria Colonna, these sonnets establish connections between history and artistic production, touching on phenomena as disparate as the theology of the Annunciation and the mining of alum. That the Italian Renaissance held great fascination for Jacob Burckhardt, Walter Pater, and Ezra Pound is less surprising than the fact that it could become the substance of a modern sonnet sequence as it has in Kevin Gallagher’s And Yet It Moves. Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Penn State University and co-author of The Madhouse Effect Kevin Gallagher’s new volume And Yet it Moves combines an array of witty poems and striking visuals to take us on that journey in the hope that we might still learn the lessons of history in time to avoid repeating past mistakes. We have much to learn from the 17th-century assault on Galileo by the Roman Catholic Church. Those who are distraught by the assault on science and reason that has infected today’s body politic might take some solace in knowing that it is not entirely without precedent. Gerrit Lansing, author of Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth In an artful euphonic voice he recreates the struggle, striking just tones of irony and indignation, making a laudable series of poems of historic imagination. Gallagher’s subject is a fitful combat of intellectual and cultural emancipation from the tyranny of the Church during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Whereas in Kevin Gallagher’s previous book of poems, LOOM, he dealt with the relationship of Northern industrialists and Southern plantation owners in a struggle toward the Emancipation, this book ‘ And Yet it Moves’ is a ‘translation’ of Galileo’s whispered teaching, Eppur si muove, after threats of torture and death by the Inquisition. Upon his sentencing, Galileo’s is said to have uttered ‘ Eppur si muove, ' knowing that the truth would eventually prevail. Digging with his pen, Gallagher brings these stories back in ‘talking sonnets,’ as if ditching the Latin for the more colloquial Italian of the people that came into form during the era. When Galileo’s patrons the powerful Medici rose to the Papacy, they chose their power over science and reason-sentencing and silencing Galileo for life for proving that the earth revolved around the sun. ![]() The book birthed humanist philosophy, masterworks such as the Birth of Venus, and inspirations for Galileo Galilei. Lucretius’s poem is a meditation of the universe as infinite numbers of atoms wandering randomly through space with no master plan whatsoever. The world changed when Poggio Bracciolini discovered Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things in a Benedictine library. Gallagher follows Petrarch, who spawns a new lyric in part inspired by lost texts, and who motivates ‘book hunters’ of the Renaissance to search for the buried as well. In And Yet it Moves, the poet is an archeologist of mourning rediscovering that assaults on science and reason are not new phenomenon.
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