Cosmonauts do it in Heaven
Keith Gottschalk is one of very few English language poets after Walt Whitman to compose poems celebrating engineers, inventions, and scientists. With wit and paradox, these poems explore our solar system and celebrate astronomers and spaceflight.
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Cosmonauts do it in Heaven
Keith Gottschalk is one of very few English language poets after Walt Whitman to compose poems celebrating engineers, inventions, and scientists. With wit and paradox, these poems explore our solar system and celebrate astronomers and spaceflight.
This collection opens with an imaginary trip through time from Copernicus to Einstein – those who literally made space as we conceptualise it today. It closes with an imaginary trip through our solar system.
In between, we find moving elegies to astronauts who lost their lives, and celebrations of a glittering international constellation of engineers, inventors, mathematicians, and researchers. Irony, allusions, double-entendres, and wonderment are always looking over the reader’s shoulder. Many of these poems, composed over thirty-four years, have already been individually published to acclaim in literary and other magazines.
Keith Gottschalk has since the 1960s published over 150 poems in magazines, anthologies, and websites. His first collection was struggle poems, Emergency Poems (1992). Keith served on the Congress of SA Writers (COSAW), currently hosts the Lansdowne Local Writers’ group, and helps out with the weekly Off-the-Wall poetry reading circle. He is a member of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa, and also of The Planetary Society.
In April 2023 he received the silver Order of Ikhamanga medal, awarded to him by President Cyril Ramaphosa. The honour is conferred by the Presidency to South African citizens who have excelled in the fields of arts, culture, literature, music, journalism or sport. The Office of the President recognised the poet “for using creativity to draw critical attention to oppressive and unjust laws through performative political poetry. The work provided strength and motivated many people to fight for liberation”.
“Keith Gottschalk’s Cosmonauts do it in Heaven speaks a beautifully crafted, compressed, sophisticated language, with an oceanic width of reference. Even where the references weren’t necessarily known to this reader, the lyrical clarity rang out:
On the western shore
renaissance of flying dragons:
you, midwife, let fly a new moon
you, bamboo too often bent
by madness of typhoons.”
– Ken Barris, award winning author
