Ice Floe Drifting

Wedding maps and menus are being posted as we speak, OFSTED paperwork is piling up for this week's inspection and my poetry event on Shackleton's Endurance story is not much more than a week away. Yikes! January is indeed a full-on month.

But I was given a huge boost recently when the editor of my Northern Lights book, Firebridge to Skyshore, offered to publish this new collection of poems as a chapbook. Sam Smith did a great job on my first book and I'm thrilled that this new sequence will find a home and a pathway into print with Original Plus Press. Look out for news of that later in the year.

That gives even more impetus to my frantic editing. Although I'm also finding myself writing new poems to round the sequence off - five in the past fortnight. I've been workshopping as many as possible at Leicester Writers' Club and this week at the new Poetry Stanza group in Leicester. This group of poetry enthusiasts offer detailed critiquing off the page so was very useful.

So I have to reflect on my great good fortune - not only to have an editor who is so supportive of my work but to live in a city where literature/writing groups abound. This week, I'm hoping to make it along to the women's poetry group Soundswrite, who are also bringing out a new anthology this year that will feature 3 of my poems.

Meanwhile, as Caroline of Stanza said, I am still on my ice floe. Here's a poem in progress:


WHITE WARFARE

they set off
to hoist a blue flag
in an empty country
a jagged ice-barbed
no-man's land

nineteen hundred
and seventeen
was a speck in the long
geological calendar
of the continent

which resumed
its freezing, melting, fastening
throes; its volcanoes
smudging black funnels
of smoke on livid skies ...

(to be continued )

Glass Plate Visions

These days many of my weekend breaks are research trips: Cardiff, Iceland - and now Liverpool. It was my first time in the city and I was here for an exhibition of photographs from the 1914 Shackleton Endurance expedition. The Albert Docks were beautiful on this bright January day and I wished we'd had more time to explore. The Maritime Museum was also very impressive with exhibitions on the Titanic, on Slavery, Art and the Sea as well as Shackleton. All good reasons in themselves to come here again but the Shackleton exhibition was so spectacular, it kept me busy for two and a half hours.




There seemed to be hundreds of photographs, all printed from Frank Hurley's original plate negatives. I learned so much about the expedition from trawling through them. And useful snippets from the men's diaries alongside. Even maps of the period were fascinating. In previous centuries, Antarctica was either completely missing from the map or 'the white edge' with no detail - the guessed-at continent. Explorers such as Shackleton had only been probing its shores for a few decades and were filling in the maps as they went.



The photographs painted a vivid picture of the hardships of the men, of their camaraderie and their increasingly desperate plight. But what shone through was the vision - literally - and the passion of one man, the remarkable Frank Hurley, a gifted photographer working at the cutting edge of his art in that era. So enthralled was he by what he saw, he even dived into the freezing waters of the sinking ship's hold to retrieve these plates. Inevitably, I started jotting a poem on the spot:



He loved the ice, this man,
laid his eyes upon it
with an illuminating caress;
sugar surface, snow pebbles, ice caves, stalactites ...
even when it defeated
them, wrenched them, imperilled
and appalled them,
he kept faith
stealing back with his tripod and plates
to spread his gaze
over its infinite broken form
its sea-changing, melting magnificence ...





I love a good museum and was astonished that this wonderful exhibition was entirely for FREE. Long may places like the Merseyside Maritime Museum escape the grasping fingers of government cuts and offer such treasures to all. I shall certainly hope to return to Liverpool.

Saturday Ice

When Shackleton was recruiting for his 1914 Imperial Transarctic Expedition, he filed thousands of applications in piles marked 'Mad, Hopeless & Possible'. It's a good slogan for the whole ill-fated voyage and a wonderful title for a poem - which I've recently written. Perhaps I'm touched with something of the same spirit in deciding to put on an event on a Saturday right between an OFSTED inspection and my own wedding. But I couldn't resist the impulse to seize the moment, while winter's grip hangs on, to tell this astonishing story in poems and pictures.


So here it is. You are invited to a Saturday afternoon of cake, story and pictures. (Yes, Gloria's best plum cake!) Take a voyage into the white beyond and shiver at the men's accounts of icy peril. All of this in the lovely, warm space of Leicester's Quaker Meeting Hall.

WHITE WARFARE: Shackleton's Endurance Expedition

In 1914, as war broke in Europe, Shackleton's ship Endurance sailed for the frozen fields of Antarctica. Intended as one final push acorss the white continent, it turned into an epic and harrowing tale of surival and loss. Now Leicester's 'Polar Poet' tells the story, drawing on the men's own words and images.

Sat. 5th February 2011
2 - 4pm at Quaker Meeting House
16 Queen's Road, Leicester, LE2 1WP
Entry: £3 (includes coffee & cake)


Last night I was watching Bruce Parry on TV venturing out between pack ice in small boats with Inuit hunters. Ice closing in and bergs looming all around. Stunning scenes that recalled the Endurance crew trying to steer their little whaling boats to safety. But Parry explores the impact of climate change and fresh industrialisation on indigenous Arctic peoples as the ice melts quicker than anybody expected. Well worth a look.


And this week, I'm hoping to travel up to Liverpool to see an exhibition of Frank Hurley's wonderful photographs from the expedition. Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum there. More inspiration.

Can you feel that nip of frostbite pinching?

Listening for Ice

While the post-Christmas thaw sets in here with its slush and grey skies, I've been hibernating in a corner of Antarctica. Mornings huddled over my Shackleton poems, wrestling sea leopards, hauling boats across hummocks, listening to the sounds of ice pressure and Emperor Penguins. Sometimes I don't even make it out of my pyjamas. The opportunity to fully immerse myself in this alien landscape, in the detail of the story, is too precious to squander.

Progress north is good so far. A dozen poems more or less edited, three new ones bashed out to plug some gaps in the narrative. Because it's all about story, this sequence - a staggering tale of 28 men drifting backwards and forwards in the pack ice while another party of 10 braved the worst conditions of the continent to lay food depots for an Imperial Transcontinental expedition that literally never got off the ground. The kind of winter tale you can really lose yourself in.

This afternoon, I'm checking out the scavenging habits of skuas, the blow-holes of killer whales and terms for ships's parts and ice-bergs. Binnacle for instance; and growlers, bergie-bits and brash ice. These words lend a particular texture and even music to the poems. I'm also trying to channel voices that might convey the story from within that tight-bound group of men. My sources, books and films, carry lots of extracts from the diaries that men were required to fill for the expedition. Shackleton was a consummate storyteller as well as a master of the psychology of survival.

And now that the sequence of around two dozen poems is firming up, I'm starting to think that I'd like to try them out for performance. A reading at the very least - hopefully with some pictures and context. Shake out the pages, open up those voices and see how the tale hangs together. Something to aim for in the New Year - we'll see. For now, I'm hunkered down in my tent with the prospect of blubber and dog pemmican for tea. I may be some time ...

Moon Gold, Solstice Dark

At 6.32 am this morning, I was ankle deep in frost, dancing a jig in the middle of the park. Followed by running in wide crescent lines like a corn-circle faker. Not as part of some archaic druid ceremony to mark the solstice, I should say, but in a vain attempt to bring warmth to my extremities. I can tell you it was colder than the aurora-watching I remember in the Arctic. Frost-bitten fingers much more stinging whenever I removed my two pairs of gloves. But the sight was unmistakeably there in front of us, slipping through ninety freezing minutes - the lunar eclipse we'd been promised.


The poem came later - my mind was too numbed as we hopped around in the dark, swapping binoculars and thermos flasks. But it was after all lovely to behold. And here it is:




Eclipse




bone white moon
spinning icy
glitter-ball bright


stained edge
of brown umber:
thumb smudge


dark rose shadow
on lonely gold:
old master light


frail lamp
in tidal dark
ebbing ink


lunar sliver
last glimmer
gone





(c) Siobhan Logan Dec. 2010

Midwinter Skin

I'm falling in love with Leicestershire's landscapes in this winter skin. Another frostbitten morning today, this time out at Beacon Hill.

Not a whisper of wind and yet it felt as cold as Iceland. My camera kept dying - begging for a warm pocket. But we coaxed these pictures out of it in between ...

The ice and rock looks as stark as anything we saw in the Arctic and the fogbank eclipsed the country below. A very magical morning. How I want this midwinter to last!

To see the whole album, hop to my Facebook photos.

Wintering out, Writing in

Winter seems to have arrived with incredible suddeness this year. So I'm feeling if I don't slow down and really taste it, the season will be gone again in the blink of an eye. And this icy Christmas week seems a frost-wrapped gift, a time that's quite-dream-like to me.


So this morning we rose early, fuelled up with porridge and scooted up to Bradgate Park, one of the loveliest places in Leicester, to catch the dawn.

And a slow burn it was, stretched out over two hours, washing colours from Arctic blue to rose to liquid gold on the water. Here's some glimpses:


It's been bone-achingly cold in air blown straight in from the Arctic. And that's kind of thrilling too for someone who's been undertaking various expeditions to Arctic landscapes in the last few years. An opportunity to layer up in all those thermals and fleeces.

Over by the water, a flotilla of small white birds in amongst the ducks - maybe Arctic refugees themselves.




Of course, it's nowhere near as freezing as Iceland was because the Arctic also has fierce winds that give their winters a real sting. When you see frozen waterfalls everywhere, then you know it's cold! But this will do very well for an old-fashioned English winter.


And I still get giddy faced with a frozen puddle or ice flowers on the grass. In the park, the river was largely frozen over, with great swirls of white on its glassy surface.


I wish I could also conjure up the crunching of frost too, the splintering of ice - or the strange mewling of the deer as they crossed the track in front of us. The shrieking of crows stark in the frozen air.





That sun with its long reach and misted light is already dipping as the solstice day approaches. So tantalisingly short.

I'm hoping to get some hibernating time this week to catch up on writing too. Especially a sequence I'm writing about Shackleton's voyage to Antarctica.

Certainly - I couldn't ask for more inspiring conditions for a Polar Poet! Time to pull on another cardigan and get out the notebooks.