{"id":10756,"date":"2020-08-27T01:01:40","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T20:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/summer-opens-its-palm-magnetic-north-by-jenna-butler\/"},"modified":"2023-02-14T01:32:31","modified_gmt":"2023-02-13T20:32:31","slug":"summer-opens-its-palm-magnetic-north-by-jenna-butler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/editorials\/summer-opens-its-palm-magnetic-north-by-jenna-butler\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer Opens Its Palm: Magnetic North<\/em> by Jenna Butler"},"content":{"rendered":"

The introduction consists of \u201cThe Journey\u201d\u2014the premise of the book explained as Butler\u2019s experience as a writer in residence on an ice-class schooner. These poems and photographs emerged over weeks spent sailing around the coasts and islands of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the high Arctic. Spanning the summer solstice, a group of artists took in the northern sun as it illuminated environmental deterioration caused by climate change.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo watch a glacier calve is to watch time run in both directions at once.\u201d Magnetic North <\/em>gives witness to destruction in the form of ice \u201ccracking its spine along the strait.\u201d Insight is surreal and fraught, reading about walks flanked by polar bear guards, \u201cboots filling with water that has not been water for eight thousand years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s backbone is a series of titled sections, introduced by an epigraph and composed of a number of prose entries that combine travel diary with reflective, lyrical field notes. Past \u201cPyramiden,\u201d an abandoned Russian coal mine \u201cweeping its coal ichor into the sea,\u201d through raucous \u201cOrnithomancy,\u201d we sail into \u201cNight,\u201d with \u201cno twilight, no dusk, no dawn…so much sun that entrails, clapped blue against the rock, morph in an instant to chickweed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDarkness has become our last wilderness,\u201d a Sid Marty epigraph warns, and Butler examines what that can mean in a world of bleached bones and snow blindness. The bright sky offers no respite from the heart-rending sight of melting ice caps, and the ship\u2019s passengers learn \u201cwhat the explorers knew: that darkness is not a right but an indulgence.\u201d Psyche layers into poetry, confronting geophysical deterioration with a precise sense of consequence: \u201cThe wilderness is in the darkness and the darkness is internal…All the world in your eyes staring back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amid unfathomable expanse, the vessel is pressurized. A group of strangers in close, daunting quarters has \u201cno space on this ship to take anything personally.\u201d For a body accustomed to prairie, there is \u201cscarcely enough room for me to circle inside my own skin,\u201d yet personal disclosure becomes part of the investigation. \u201cThere is nowhere to hide…split open to this place at the top of the world.\u201d The writer delves deeper, weaving her own embodied currents with deft descriptions of the people inhabiting these remotest of places. \u201cWhere are the women in all this?\u201d Questions resonate amid scrap metal and mines. Perhaps waiting on a mainland, in \u201can altered interior country, even if the men come home again.\u201d Somehow desolation remains rife with vital movement.<\/p>\n

The section \u201cLeaving Days\u201d gives way to \u201cSong to the Boreal,\u201d a closing hymn. At home, the danger is crude oil and forest fire\u2014connected threats of heat. Immersed in familiar botany, we are left with a beautiful, ongoing reckoning as \u201cSummer opens its palm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Butler\u2019s tuned-in engagement with nature appears set to continue in her forthcoming essay collection Revery: A Year of Bees<\/em>, out from Wolsak and Wynn in 2020.<\/p>\n

K.B. Thors<\/strong> is the author of Vulgar Mechanics<\/em> (Coach House Books) and translator of Krist\u00edn Svava T\u00f3masd\u00f3ttir\u2019s Stormwarning, nominated for the 2019 PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation and winner of the American Scandinavian Foundation\u2019s Leif and Inger Sj\u00f6berg Prize. Her reviews have appeared in the Harvard Review, Lambda Literary, and EuropeNow, among other journals. Currently she is the 2020 CBC\/QWF Montr\u00e9al Writer in Residence.<\/p>\n

ARC<\/a> HITS THE HEART HARD.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard<\/em> is a finely drawn follow-up to Jenna Butler\u2019s critically acclaimed poetry books, ecocriticism, and award-winning ecological writing about farming off the grid. With a poet\u2019s ear and the observant attention of an environmental steward, Magnetic North is an intimate, breathtaking trek from the boreal forest to the Arctic Ocean\u2014and back again. Human survival and impact are cast against sublime landscapes in this meditative, timely travelogue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3158,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"10753,10144,10787,10858","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2047,1674],"tags":[],"genre":[21],"publisher":[221],"issue":[],"poet-in-residence":[],"series":[],"topic":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10756"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10756"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=10756"},{"taxonomy":"publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publisher?post=10756"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=10756"},{"taxonomy":"poet-in-residence","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/poet-in-residence?post=10756"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=10756"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcpoetry.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=10756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}