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About Toward Antarctica
Product Description *Selected as a Top 10 Must-Read Book About Antarctica by the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators Poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s fourth collection, Toward Antarctica, documents and queries her work as a guide on ships in Antarctica, offering an incisive insider’s vision that challenges traditional tropes of The Last Continent. Inspired by haibun, a stylistic form of Japanese poetry invented by 17th-century poet, Matsuo Bashō to chronicle his journeys in remote Japan, Bradfield uses photographs, compressed prose, and short poems to examine our relationship to remoteness, discovery, expertise, awe, labor, temporary societies, “pure” landscapes, and tourism’s service economy. Antarctica was the focus of Bradfield’s Approaching Ice, written before she had set foot on the continent; now Toward Antarctica furthers her investigation with boots on the ground. A complicated love letter, Toward Antarctica offers a unique view of one of the world’s most iconic wild places. Review Reading Elizabeth Bradfield’s Toward Antarctica is like having a poet’s behind-the-scenes tour of a natural history museum. Through her expert eyes, the exquisite landscape and wildlife come into vivid view; so does the gutsy work and responsibility of being a naturalist guide. Inspired by Japanese haibun form, the book pairs the lyric intensity of poetry with the fragmented, staccato prose of a mind trying to keep track of the flood of experience. Bradfield’s gorgeous photographs add yet another dimension of aesthetic experience. Her work is a resonant exploration of bringing art and science together to sing a mindful duet.—Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit and Stairway to Heaven; Chair of Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona, founder of the Field Studies in Writing Program Toward Antarctica is a travelogue, a meditation, a photo-essay, a documentary poem, an ode, and an elegy. It is a work of eco- and cultural criticism, personal essay, history, and photojournalism. Like the poem-prose hybrid haibun form, which provides the structural basis for this book, Toward Antarctica moves between different genres and literary forms, challenging our notion of what a travel narrative can and should be. The best writers understand that all works of literature are hybrids at heart, and Elizabeth Bradfield pushes the limits of what we imagine poetry can do, capturing her time in Antarctica in lush, yet always tightly controlled images that throb with musical life. With a photographer’s eye and a naturalist’s sense of the world, Bradfield shows us life in Antarctica to be a strange, magical, occasionally lethal mixture of the human and the animal, a place that exists as much in our romantic imaginations as it does in the world itself, an environment that continues to evade our comprehension even as it remains subject to our human impact. Bradfield’s epic poem-memoir shows us that Antarctica is the continent to which we are ever traveling, upon whose shores we never truly arrive.—Paisley Rekdal, author of Imaginary Vessels and Intimate: An American Family Photo Album So many of us hunger for Antarctica. For its promise of something so notably new to our experience, pristine. Though very little is wholly pristine on this planet, very little is free of our “fantastic, greasy hope.” It seems fitting that in her deep and thoughtful journey to the site of so many voyagers’ ambitions Elizabeth Bradfield would turn to the form Bashō found so useful for his own Narrow Road to the Interior. A naturalist, poet, and photographer, Bradfield is as keen-eyed about the continent and its surrounding islands as she is about the souls counted present on the ship that takes them there. This balance between expansive views and focused clarity make reading Toward Antarctica almost as good as sailing there ourselves.—Camille T. Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade and editor of Black Nat
