The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral

First published in 1973, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral introduced not only a splendid new poet but a whole new adventure in poetry. With bravura style, unbridled imagination, and a connoisseur's eye for precise scientific detail, Diane Ackerman’s debut brought us an unforgettable ode to each planet in our solar system, not to mention the moon, the comet Kohoutek, and the asteroid belt, as well as  strange voyages to the stars, the bottom of the sea, through the human body, and into the mind.

Diane Ackerman herself says: “I’ve always been baffled by people who write about nature only in terms of, say, junipers and cornfields, eschewing all things so-called ‘scientific,’ as if science were, per se, the spoil-sport of feeling. So wonderless a view of nature really doesn’t appeal to me.” The Planets is a rare fusion of art and science—one of the great poetic works of cosmic imagination.

About Marginalian Editions

Marginalian Editions is a collaboration between Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson Books and writer Maria Popova, who selects and introduces forgotten masterworks that deserve a second life—uncommon books at the intersection of wonder and our search for meaning, from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s literature.

“Diane Ackerman has produced a stunning book of poetry in The Planets, the result of a year’s immersion in the recent findings in planetary astronomy. The work is scientifically accurate and even a convenient introduction to modern ideas on the planets, but much more important, it is spectacularly good poetry, clear, lyrical and soaring . . . One of the triumphs of Ackerman’s pastoral is the demonstration of how closely compatible planetary exploration and poetry, science and art really are.” 

—Carl Sagan, The New Republic

“Ackerman has an admirable ability to keep the observing eye firmly within the frame of each of these highly-colored poems . . . To a remarkable degree, she succeeds by referring each abstraction, speculation, bit of planetary data to some dense, sensual, or just plain fundamental experience she has had . . . The cumulative effect is that of a small, beautifully arranged museum of solar artifacts, where everything tells and more than a few things instruct and delight.” 

—Kirkus Reviews 

“Our candidate for the year’s most impressive debut in poetry between hard covers. She uses the entire solar system for her audition piece.”

—Knight News Service

“A scintillating cartography of the major planets and asteroids in easily assimilated verse forms that return the poet to earth to delve into the awesome magnetism of space . . . An important work by a new poet”

—Booklist

“A graceful and important pas de deux. Not since the Eighteenth Century have scientific fact and imaginative fancy been so thoroughly joined in a single set of poems.”

—The Hollins Critic

“There is a youthful exuberance to these poems, a lilting, witty, sensuous, wondrous cosmic meander sung like the pastoral of its title. Nature is her mirror and her measure.” 

—MIT Technology Review

“What is gained from these wonderfully effusive meditations on the firmament? Energy, certainly, wit and strong feeling. And who knows but knowledge, too?” 

—Epoch

Poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman is the author of over two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry, including the New York Times bestsellers The Zookeeper’s Wife, A Natural History of the Senses, and The Human Age.

Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning—sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse—a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry—has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.

Alpha and Omega • Hardcover ISBN: 9781961341418

Sep 9, 2025 • Marginalian Editions

6" x 8.5" • 272 pages • $19.00

eBook ISBN: 9781961341425