Discourses: Poems for the Royal Institution edited by Jo
Shapcott, Royal Institution, £5, ISBN 0903496070 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
THE lectures at London’s Royal Institution aren’t just famous, they’re fabled. They are given by experts on subjects of their own choosing, mostly science or technology, and one of the attractions is the ingenuity and spectacle of the demonstrations that accompany them. Merely “interested” audiences are rare at these lectures. Usually they are spellbound.
The RI has maintained links with poets since it first commissioned a series of lectures by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1808. This collection of poems is the…
