Why would a poet spend eleven years writing about a region she had never seen? Because she needs a country of the mind, where she can explore imagination beyond her personal limits. Dilys Wood’s collection, Antarctica, yokes together two imagined territories: the first part contains poems about the White Continent; the second is a verse novella set in the West of Ireland but featuring two Antarctic heroes. Although this link serves to justify the novella’s inclusion, the most important character is Nell Crean, wife of one explorer. She and the tale of love and adventure in which she is involved are entirely fictional.
The liberties which the poet takes with fact and reality are unsettling because the less informed reader cannot know when events or details in the poem are based on the writer’s research, or when they are invented. Perhaps the opening poem, ‘The Ancient Mariner’s Last Voyage’, offers some clues to the poet’s project. The title is clearly a reference to Coleridge’s poem in which we know the protagonist ‘wounded Mother Earth’ by killing the albatross. However, the ‘I’ in this poem cannot satisfactorily be equated with Coleridge’s mariner. This ‘I’ is travelling on a ship called ‘Sleeping Beauty’, a ship which seems simultaneously to represent the White Continent and the speaker’s mother.
Sleeping, she appears calm and lovely but, under many deep layers, is an old woman, coarse and slovenly – The speaker claims to want to test the ‘ice, the blue ice’ but is ambivalent about this quest. ‘Oh do not wake her’ is a plea which could equally be attributed to the poem’s speaker or an interlocutor. Perhaps this is a voyage of self-discovery but the speaker is afraid of what may be discovered. We recognise that this ancient mariner is probably a woman – a woman searching for herself but afraid what she will find is her mother. The poem subverts male icons in order to engage in a feminist concern – the relationship between mothers and daughters.
So what is the attraction of an area and a period of discovery which is so stubbornly masculine? There’s a male bonding thing/women not ‘right’ here’ (‘Chauvinist on the BAS’).The poet does explore the experience of women in the Antarctic, as in the poem based on Sara Wheeler’s, Terra Incognita, Travels in Antarctica, which celebrates a woman who has been enabled to escape from herself: ‘happy, though I somehow broke the circuit/that linked me to old loves, to old, old flames.’ The image of the ‘ice-lens’, ice as a lens which allows solar heat to be trapped in deep under- ice lakes, also appears in the attractive sequence ‘Love in a Freezing Climate’.
These poems, too, are highly ambiguous.
Again, there is doubt over what lies beneath the ice: ‘Is it something soft, bright, rich, gorgeous,/or ice, more ice, and under ice, bare rock?’ In ‘He Builds Her an Igloo’ the last lines are wry, chilling at every level: ‘Try out my ice-bed? Want to be the first?’ I believe Wood is attracted to these early twentieth century heroes and to this unyielding territory, not because she wants to present the female experience, nor even because of worthy environmental concerns, but because this topic allows her to escape from herself so that her imagination operates more freely. This is seen to good effect in ‘Future’, where the extraction of a tooth triggers a vision of global catastrophe followed by a hint of renewal: ‘Creeping on my hand/is the smallest snail… The snail’s your tooth transformed!’ In The South Pole Inn, the verse novella which forms the second, much longer part of this collection, we see more results of this liberated imagination. The village of Anascaul, the West of Ireland, the characters, their dialect and the adventures which befall them are all unreal. This move away from reality allows the poet to create a language which is robust, sometimes comic, and often surprising: ‘Begob, the nipple on that side/comes up fat as a cigar-butt!’ The narrative comprises a series of monologues by different characters, sometimes including dialogue. This can be confusing and there is some lack of differentiation in the voices. I was intrigued by this poem but a little uncertain how it might best be delivered; perhaps it would work well on radio.
Intriguing is perhaps the best word for the whole volume. It asks a lot of questions, but perhaps does not have quite enough space to provide some of the answers. I felt the poems in the first part were a selection from a much larger work and would have liked to see the novella embedded in a bigger collection.
However, the desire for more must be a tribute to the quality of writing.
Kathleen McPhilemy is a further education lecturer in Oxford. Her most recent poetry collection is The Lion in the Forest (Katabasis, 2004).
Antarctica by Dilys Wood, Greendale Press (London 2008), 95 pages, £5.95.