Andrew Button, "Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza"

 

Born in Nottingham in 1965, Andrew Button grew up there before leaving for university and currently lives in Leicestershire. He works as a librarian for Warwickshire County Council. Andrew has had many poems placed in magazines and anthologies and a pamphlet, Dry Days in Wet Towns, was published in 2016. To date, he has had three collections published by erbacce press: The Melted Cheese on the Cosmic Pizza (2017), Music for Empty Car Parks (2019) and Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza (2023).

As a performing poet, he has headlined and performed at various open mics and in libraries (and online) mainly across the Midlands, including Coventry’s Fire & Dust, Coventry Central Library, Nottingham’s Crossed Words, Derby’s Wordwise, Chesterfield’s Spire Writes, Leicester’s now-defunct Shindig, Birmingham’s Poetry Bites, Lichfield’s Poetry Alight, Leamington’s Script Stuff and PureGoodandRight and several Warwickshire libraries, to name but a few. In April 2025, he started his own open mic, Can of Words, in Coalville.

Andrew's poetic influences range from Ian MacMillan, Simon Armitage, Phillip Larkin, Lavinia Greenlaw, Roger McGough to Ray Bradbury, the lyrics of 10cc and Mary Chapin Carpenter, music in general and Yorkshire tea (lots of it)! His poetry is observational, anecdotal and ironic. He likens himself to a poetic eavesdropper and is a keen observer of eccentric and obsessive behaviour. 

About Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza, by Andrew Button
Many of the poems in Andrew’s latest collection were written in Lockdown and shortly afterwards. As a result, there are a raft of poems that reflect the state of physical and mental confinement that we faced, but at the same time, they are looking for the light of better times. This is juxtaposed with poems about space (including the title piece), the irony of which was never more evident than during the COVID crisis. 

At other moments, the book is interspersed with quirky poetical observations on everything from pensioners riding in pelotons, the President of the UK Roundabout Appreciation Society, to toilet paper engineers and the eccentric habits of the Swiss on Sundays.

Above all, this collection reveals Andrew’s certifiable optimism and roving poetic eye that takes in a smorgasbord of subjects and themes.

You can read more about Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza

Space

Floating in our tiny orbits,
satellites of the sofa,
the world has shrunk.
If it wasn’t for the gravity
of the situation,
we’d be free to roam,
untethered, beyond these rooms.

Housebound, the supermarket mission
is one small step of any kind
and our ground control
is Marcus Rashford and Sir Captain Tom.

Distance from loved ones
feels like galaxies
as parts of families
have become detached
from their docking stations.

Like astronauts
and the Kinks
on Waterloo Sunset,
every day, we look at the world
from our windows,
real and televisual
and fasten ourselves in
to the sentiments of Mr Blue Sky.

Keep telling ourselves,
as Tim Peake must have done
when falling to earth,
re-entry won’t be long.

Static in the Wires

We surge through the years
from babbling babies
to vibrant young adults.
From confident thirty somethings
to anchored middle age
and venerable seniority.
Industrious as ants,
we accumulate memories
and experiences
storing them on the grid
of our minds
ready to be discharged
when required. 
If we’re lucky,
in life we’ll rub off
on our children, relatives
and friends
and in death,
remain an invisible force
of energy
like static in the wires.

Astro-Poetry Competition 2021: The Results and the Poems

As part of the second-year module, Using Stories, we explore some of the ways in which Creative Writing might draw on and explore scientific material. This includes, for example, looking at some of the amazing discoveries by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and using them as starting points for new poems. 

Arising from this, we ran a competition in early 2021, open to all Creative Writing students at the University of Leicester, in which they were asked to submit poems inspired, in some way, by Chandra's findings. You can see the original call for submissions and description of the competition here.

The entries we received were all, in their different ways, wonderful explorations of the fascinating interconnections between Creative Writing and science. It was naturally very hard to select winners and runners-up; but we chose two winners and two 'honourable mentions.' Congratulations to all four writers, and thank you to everyone who submitted poems for the competition.

Here are the results:

Winners

There were two joint winning poems: ‘IC 4593’ by Laura Sygrove, and ‘A New Cosmic Triad of Sound’ by Rebecca Hughes. You can read these poems on NASA Chandra X-Ray's website here.

Honourable Mentions

There were two 'Honourable Mentions': 'A Matter of Life Span' by Lena Elin Jetses, and 'Infant Star' by Isaac Plant. You can read these poems below. 

Lena Elin Jetses is a twenty-year-old English student at the University of Leipzig in Germany, on an exchange at the University of Leicester. She enjoys writing fantasy novels and short stories, preferably at 4am and fuelled by alternative rock music, tea and chocolate. She writes: 'For this poem, the idea was to capture the enthusiasm of scientists trying to understand as much about space as possible. What struck me about the original article ('Oldest Known Objects Are Surprisingly Immature') was the fascination with the fact that age does not equal evolutionary stage for globular clusters. It puts being human beings' lifetime into perspective, and that is what I tried to convey.'

NASA/CXC/Northwestern/ J. Fregeau

A Matter of Life Span

All grown-up and ready to explore, 
humanity jumps straight out of college
into space, the final frontier.
Right outside our earthly door
we hope to find ancient knowledge
in globular clusters far and near.

Those clusters serve as laboratories
where we study on and on
about stars a million times our ages.
As we count x-ray binaries,
we hearken to expert Fregeau, John,
who names the evolutionary stages.

Meanwhile in the Milky Way
those giants waste billions of years away.
Their celestial nurseries
can be found in all galaxies.
We strive to find answers, we strive to be sure;
yet in 9 billion years they never mature.

Isaac Plant is a second-year English student from the north east. He writes: 'The article I read on the formation of protostars ('X-Rays from a Newborn Star Hint at our Sun's Earliest Days') didn't just provide interesting language as part of a found poetry task we did in class, but also contained an interesting analogy for growth. I found the image of this inward collapse and possible destruction being a necessary part of the star's evolution an interesting parallel to concepts of personal growth in which one must risk destroying parts of one's old self to become something new.'

X-ray: NASA/CXC/Aix-Marseille University/N. Grosso et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

Infant Star

Young protostar, beautiful nebula,
Blackhole iris, spiralling disks obscure,
Sending waves, a solar tributary,
Aeons of cosmic flooding to endure,
Conceived in molecular cloud complex,
Solar systems past, broken and reborn,
Atomic mapping joyfully undone,
Universal tapestry newly torn,
Long-awaited stellar evolution,
Light piercing cocoon of dust and gas,
Metamorphosis of millennia,
Stalwart heart of light or glimmer to pass,
A break of the celestial at last,
Life-giving host star or unyielding vast.

Call for Submissions for AstroPoetry Competition

 

Abell 2261

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Michigan/K. Gültekin;

Optical: NASA/STScI and NAOJ/Subaru; Infrared: NSF/NOAO/KPNO

Call for Submissions for AstroPoetry Competition!

The Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester invites submissions of cosmologically-themed poems for a competition run in conjunction with NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory in Harvard. The competition is open to all students studying Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, and the deadline for entries is Friday 12 February 2021. The winning entry will be published on Chandra X-Ray Observatory's remarkable and world-famous blog. The competition grows out of our second-year undergraduate module, Using Stories, as part of which students explore how scientific discoveries, themes and images can inspire new writing. 

What you have to do

The challenge is to write a poem, no longer than 30 lines, inspired in some way by one of the news stories on Chandra X-Ray Observatory's blog, which you can see here. The nature of this inspiration is up to you - it might be a matter of theme, imagery, language, or a mixture of these things, just so long as it's clear that the poem is connected in some way with the original news story. You should submit your poem as an email attachment to Jonathan Taylor (jt265[at]le[dot]ac[dot]uk) by the deadline, including the weblink to the specific news story to which your poem relates. 

Some guidelines

• You need to be a student taking at least one module in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester to enter.
• You should specify which news story on Chandra's blog your poem relates to.
• Entries will be judged by Jonathan Taylor at the University of Leicester. The judge's decision is final. 
• The deadline is Friday 12 February 2021. 
• The winning entry will be published on Chandra's blog; runners-up may be published on the Creative Writing at Leicester blog. 

Previous competitions

You can read the winning poems from previous poetry competitions we have run with Chandra X-Ray Observatory in 2016 here and 2017 here. You can read the runner-up poems from the 2017 competition here. You can read some poems Jonathan Taylor wrote for Chandra here, here, here and here. 

Thanks

Thank you to Dr. Peter Edmonds and everyone at NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory for their kind help in running this unique competition. 

Cosmological Poems for NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory

(Image: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alberta/B.Tetarenko et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/AUI/NRAO/Curtin Univ./J. Miller-Jones)

As part of the second year undergraduate Creative Writing module, "Using Stories," students explore some of the overlaps between science and writing. This year, Dr. Ian Whittaker from the Department of Physics and Astronomy gave an amazing guest lecture on various remarkable astronomical phenomena; and students were encouraged to write poems inspired by cosmological research, and, in particular, the ground-breaking work of NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory in Harvard. We subsequently ran a poetry competition in conjunction with Chandra, for which students were invited to submit poems inspired (directly or indirectly) by one of Chandra's news stories.

The winning poem has now been chosen. The winner of the competition is Fraser McIntosh, with his poem "VLA J2130 + 12." You can read the winning entry published on NASA Chandra's famous website here. 

There were also two runners-up, by Alicia Saccoh and Olivia Titherington, which are featured below. 


Musicality: 10


When I turn my insides out for you, I let them hit the boards.
Every stage I’ve ever taken, ever floor I’ve fallen on,
They all hold my DNA within the graining of their wood.
It soaks me up. I get so thirsty, but it fades when I spill blood,
The purest form, you see, of beauty

Is the dying, desperate swan, her joints near-breaking – 
Oh, they must be!
How else could her body do – ? But no,
She lives
She breathes
She moves
And weeps 
And dances hard and long,
Hard and long.
All through the day,
And night,
No sleep! Hearts to be won!
And how could I waste time to eat 
When the extension of my upheld wrist 

Throughout the grand jeté,
Is not yet quite – just – so?
Tell me: how could I? I could not, 
And so I wake up, 
Get up; dark out, lights on
Stretch out, warm up
Oh, and where's the day gone? 
It's almost time for bed again
My blood is on the floor again
I've never been more beautiful. I am sure to be fed. 
The moment comes, 
The lights illuminate me 
And your cries immortalise me
And the moment forces me to break myself again,
And the music grabs and tears at me 
And pulls me by my hair 
And still the promise of your love
Is rising, forcing my feet up, 
Up, up!

Ankles well over toes and turned right out and held so high 
And – there.
That is how it happens. 
That is how a tired thing flies. 


By Alicia Saccoh, inspired by Chandra's press release ‘Astronomers Discover Powerful Cosmic Double Whammy,’ January 5 2017. 

 

The Sun and Her Children


She is the oldest woman of the sky,
The sun lit the earth from above and high.
Bright and burning with her orange-red glow,
Her presence was loved by creatures below.
And when she had burned and the day was done,
The light was hidden, the darkness had come.
She knew it was the time to take cover, 
As the Moon would soon rise and take over.
His grey light was no match for her fire,
But still he did always desire
To keep the night and to take back the day, 
And keep out the sun much to her dismay.
And when day was over she’d weep all night, 
Sadness that came with darkness dimmed her light.
The late hours and night were a loss she’d mourn,
Until she did have her spot back at dawn.
And when the light mellowed and the dusk came,
Her joy was gone, she not did feel the same.
This sky, the moon and she would always share,
She knew that it could never be for her.

On time went and centuries passed by,
Like different visitors in the sky.
They greeted the sun and they left their mark,
She knew they would not be there after dark.
And now only few of her friends remain,
The Thunder and the lightning and the rain.
Despite her sorrow the sun still burned bright,
But longed for company in the dark night.
She wished for something she could call her own,
Something she could love and have at her home.
With this wish the silver stars were now born,
They were with her at dusk and stayed at dawn.
The sun was radiant and with joy she beamed,
She was not alone at night when she dreamed.
Stars filled the sky with glittery glow,
They sawed and glistened, and put on a show.
Their presence dazzled the creatures of Earth,
The sky was brighter now than the Sun’s birth.

In the middle of the glowing Sun’s joy,
The silver Moon still remained sly and coy.
He had become ugly, jealous, angry,
He stayed in shadows of the family.
He had had enough of the stars and her,
He planned to take the stars, he did not care.
And when the night came again the sun slept,
And with a vision the sleepy moon crept.
To commit the greatest heist ever done,
And he took out the bright stars one by one.
They were iridescent but not as much,
The result of his cold and icy touch.
The stars fought to stay with their mother,
They pleaded to stay with one another.
He had no mercy, he stole them away,
They never again saw the sun or the day.

The sun awoke from her restful night’s sleep,
She found out what happened and she wept.
Although she still burned and glowed forever,
She did not rise at dawn for whatever.
Two full moons had appeared and then gone,
And still the sad sun had not rose or shone.
The earth was festooned in sheets of white cold,
The result of the darkness staying bold.
The creatures of earth longed for her yellow heat,
And yet the solemn sun still retreated.
They wished on the stars that stayed in the dark,
They remained with their silhouette stark.
These stars mourned for these creatures below,
So with their power they burned bright and glowed.
Sun saw their light in sadness and despair,
Finally she had power to repair
The moon’s touch and she rose in the dark sky,
The ice melted and the creatures sighed.
The sun saw how much she was longed for,
And vowed to rise each day forever more.

The sun rises in the early hours,
Until the dusk comes and the moon towers.
Earth is not ever-bright as it had been,
The sun still shone but was not always seen.
She remains modest in some cold seasons,
Her sleep and rest does not need a reason.
But the Earth still spins and life does go on,
For they know she will not always be gone.
Some months she provides warmth everywhere,
Some months Earth is cold and sunlight is rare.
Some months she is discreet behind the clouds,
Some months they await her and say aloud:
“She’s there, it’s warmer, and flowers will bloom!”
As she guides them from the cold weather’s gloom
This season is spring starting the year,
No one complains because summer’s near.
The sun is content, with Earth as her friend
But she won’t forget, her heart will not mend.
She still wishes the stars were there by her side,
Burning bright by her, with her as their guide.
The stars remember the bright fire always,
The one who stands alone throughout the days.
The stars still follow the moon in the night,
But they glow for her with eternal light.


By Olivia Titherington, inspired by Chandra's press release ‘Astronomers Gain New Insight into Magnetic Field of Sun and its Kin,’ July 27 2016.