Life on Mars

Life on Mars is a 2011 poetry collection by the American poet Tracy K. Smith, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. It fuses science fiction with an elegy for her father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, and is prescribed for HSC English Extension 1 in the elective Hybrid Worlds.

Tracy K. Smith (born 1972), Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019, published Life on Mars in 2011, and it won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Its title borrows David Bowie's 1971 song, and the book is saturated with the popular science fiction of the twentieth century - Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the novels of Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven, Charlton Heston's dystopian screen roles, the Cold War space race - all pulled into the service of a private grief. At its centre the collection is an elegy for the poet's father, Floyd Smith, an optical engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

The collection is organised into four movements that refuse to stay in their lanes. "Sci-Fi" opens the book in the mock-prophetic future tense of pulp science fiction. "My God, It's Full of Stars" runs a five-part sequence that shifts form on every section, from zombie-movie catalogue to Charlton Heston monologue to metaphysical couplets to film ekphrasis to an engineer father's elegy. "Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?" turns David Bowie into a demigod hailing a taxi. "The Universe as Primal Scream" hears the apocalypse in a neighbour's screaming children, and "The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" imagines the cosmos as a scratched film score.

It is also a book of its post-9/11 moment: alongside the cosmic poems, Life on Mars reaches into Abu Ghraib, a father who imprisoned his daughter in a cellar, and racially motivated killings, so that "space" is never an escape from history but a lens that makes earthly horror newly strange and legible.

The deepest hybrid in the book is generic: Life on Mars is an elegy written in the language of science fiction. Smith mourns her father through the vocabulary of his own laboratory - "When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said / They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed / In papery green" - and his ease at his instrument slides into a premonition of the grave, "as if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending / Night of space". The cosmic scale both dwarfs the loss and gives grief a vocabulary large enough to hold it.

The collection is built out of other texts. Its title is a Bowie song, its most famous poem takes its title from a line in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, and it ventriloquises Charlton Heston as a Moses-like oracle. Bowie is canonised in a deliberate register clash - "That's Bowie / For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ" - while the ekphrasis of Kubrick's star-gate sequence, "When Dave is whisked into the center of space", turns a film's special effects into a vision of the sublime. Meaning is generated between the poems and the culture they sample.

Even within a single line, Smith collides high and low registers. "Sci-Fi" adopts the confident cadence of utopian futurism, "There will be no edges, but curves. / Clean lines pointing only forward", then collapses it into bathos: "Women will still be women, but / The distinction will be empty". In "The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" the cosmos becomes a scratched album whose "first track still almost swings. High hat and snare", before cosmic darkness turns bodily, "Marbled with static like gristly meat".

Life on Mars is also a religious book that refuses religious language. In "It & Co." the divine is named simply "It" - theology conducted in a deliberately secular idiom. The metaphysical couplets of "My God, It's Full of Stars" wonder "Perhaps the great error is believing we're alone", and when the restored Hubble sees "to the edge of all there is - / So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back", the elegy resolves into an awe that is also fear, the universe looking back at the mourner.

The wonder is shadowed throughout by earthly horror. By setting interstellar speculation beside torture and cruelty without transition, the hybrid structure forces the reader to feel how a single culture produces both the telescope and the torture cell - while the close of the soundtrack poem offers a consolation it will not confirm: "Everything that disappears / Disappears as if returning somewhere".

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