Toward Antarctica

"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 Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry "Modern expedition ships sail south to Antarctica every year, carrying continent-baggers and bucket-listers who drink a toast to Shackleton, pat themselves on the back, and heroically claim, “We made it!” It takes a poet, and a darn good one, “to at once be there and to not even come close.” This is Elizabeth Bradfield writing to the truth in what she calls, “crepuscular moments of poetry . . . Here on this unbridled ocean. Here on this world unto itself.” Having been to Antarctica many times, and studied its literature, I found this book an artful standout from the crowd, one garnished with reflection and rust, humor and humility, sincerity, and respect." —Kim Heacox, author of Antarctica: The Last Continent, Jimmy Bluefeather, and The Only Kayak "Toward Antarctica is the most original piece of travel writing about the Antarctic region I have read in years, combining the emotional honesty, immediacy, and telegraphic brevity of the diary with the literary control and imagistic precision of a fine poet. Through both her photographs and her writing, Bradfield challenges the clichés of the conventional Antarctic journey narrative while conveying a profound appreciation of the region’s natural environment and human history. Well-informed but uninterested in asserting priority or authority, lyrical but never overblown, Bradfield is a literary tour guide in the best sense." —Elizabeth Leane, Antarctic scholar and literary critic, author of Antarctica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far South "Her most recent book, Toward Antarctica, is a buoyant and nuanced collection that rewards the reader who stands at its bow and pays attention." —Christine Byl, Women's Review of Books "I enjoyed Elizabeth Bradfield's words and images from the Big White. Hers is an unusual approach, and one that is to be welcomed in the still small canon of artistic responses to the Antarctic—particularly by women. I wholeheartedly recommend this special book." —Sara Wheeler, author of Terra Incognita and The Magnetic North "...an insider’s love letter to one of the world’s most iconic wild places, and I found it unique, moving and brilliantly informative."—Marjorie Lewis-Jones, South Sydney Herald "Thanks to Bradfield’s diverse skills as poet, photographer, and naturalist, we gain unique vantage to the elusive continent as she gives us not just an adventure epic but a revealing, complex meditation, a portrait of the “lost continent” that is elegiac, wide-ranging, and intimate."—Holly J. Hughes, Terrain.org "In circling feeling, and in naming the longed-for world from so many angles, Bradfield offers us a way into the full, messy richness of our hunger to belong."—Tess Taylor, Orion Magazine "...Elizabeth Bradfield’s Toward Antarctica (Boreal Books, 2019) also belongs in the hands of anyone still seeking a renewed appreciation for the grandeur of the natural world."—Emma Winters, America Magazine