Simon Leonardo Altmann

Collected Poems: 1960-2021 Simon Leonardo Altmann

This collection of poems is unusual in more than one way. To start with, it covers chronologically a period of more than seventy years, and it reflects many of the great problems of our time: climate change, natural resources, famine, nuclear holocausts, terrorism, 9/11, technological changes, pollution, the assaults on democracy, and so on. The contents of the book is also unusual and reflects the very wide range of interests of the author, who is a mathematical physicist, but who has done research and writing in philosophy and art. The reader will also find a number of science poems which, as a difference with the science problems of the last generation, deal with the creative struggle in scientific discoveries, rather than in the emotions that poets may have in being exposed to the mysteries of science. A poem given here on the discovery of the electromagnetic interaction was in fact adopted in the physics course at Reading University and it helped even the lecturers to understand the subject at depth. An important use of poetry is the satirical treatment of social and political problems and the reader will find numerous such examples in this collection, which I hope might revive this approach, so important in the past. An unusual aspect of this collection is that the author, whose first language was Spanish, in which he had constantly written since he was 15, had to undertake a period of transition of some ten years until he arrived at his new language. Some of the early Spanish poems appear at the beginning of the collection, with English translations. However, when compiling this Collection the author discovered some lost early Spanish poems that are given here as an Appendix and that might help the reader to understand how deep a change is required when changing language: it is not just the vocabulary or the prosody that changes, it is a different view of life that appears.