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Antarctica, Dilys Wood, 2008, Greendale Press. £5.95

 
What is immediately clear from the first poem in this book, The Ancient Mariner’s Last Voyage, is that Dilys Wood has involved herself so deeply in the subject of Antarctica that it has become part of her thinking. Every poem is an imaginative creation which has grown out of her passionate connection with the White Continent. In writing about its character, its explorers and people who work there now, she makes it a base to tackle subjects which are key to her, in particular the role of women and climate change. 

The book begins with a series of poems in which different voices present their own versions of Antarctica. The language is exciting, the approaches ambitious, the mood and tone varied. There are dream visions with extraordinary connections which carry a strong emotional charge – the finding of the tent with the explorers who died on their return from the South Pole is juxtaposed with a dream about ‘women called Mary’ walking “abreast / behind Dad’s coffin” for example. In complete contrast there is a group of extravagant love poems. Throughout the reader is aware of the physicality of Antarctica, the colours of its skies, the overwhelm of its darkness and light:

Darkness at noon. But how also
explain too much light? Trapped inside a diamond,
you haul sledge in some spot rifted with crevasses –
you wrench off goggles to guide the team
and know you’ll not sleep that night, eyes sewn
with the burning wires of snow-blindness!

These lines are from Apsley Cherry-Garrard Addresses The Royal Geographical Society, a monologue in which Wood brilliantly juxtaposes the sense of being a member of an exploration team, references to World War One, the mood of post-war weariness and the speaker’s perceptions following his Antarctic experiences. He suggests ironically that his audience want to hear that all is right with the world, then gives them evidence that “Nothing’s stable”, that the ice age could be reversed.  This subtle poem ends with a double-edged apology for offering disturbing views.

The South Pole Inn, the second part of this book, is a fictional narrative set in Ireland in the 1920s. The earlier poems act as a preliminary to it as the main male characters, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley were both Polar explorers and their experiences underlie the story. The central character, Nell Crean, was also a real person. Wood explains in her preface that she has taken basic details from the lives of these three, including the fact that Tom Crean bought a pub in Anascaul which he named The South Pole Inn, but that the delineation of the story and characters is entirely fictional.

The poem is a tour de force. Research has again been used for a genuine creative end and the pacey narrative with lively and often earthy dialogue focusses on the high-spirited and capable Nell who feels trapped in her role as a woman especially with her silent and unimaginative husband. The plot has two strands. One is the love relationship which develops between Nell and Frank Worsley, who comes to visit Tom and collapses in a high fever on the doorstep when he arrives. The other is the smuggling out of the country of the money left by Tom’s old aunt so that it’s kept in the family and doesn’t get into the hands of the ‘hard’ IRA men. The weaving together of these strands with reference to Ireland’s history and a real incident from the past is totally convincing, as is the integration of Crean and Worsley’s polar experiences.

Wood’s mode in this is very effective. Each chapter is a monologue by one of the main characters which shifts between utterance of thoughts and speech, whether in the immediate past or earlier, and references to previous incidents. This makes for great immediacy and it also means that much is covered in a short space. The South Pole Inn is a compelling novel compressed into seventy pages of compact five-line verses. Here is Nell speaking at a point when Frank Worsley is still ill and talking half-deliriously about the expedition led by Shackleton which both he and Tom went on:

… Is Frank on the mend? Is he? Well, I’m basking
in the man’s lop-sided smiles. Such a way with him!

Committing adultery as I mop his brow…
Other times, he rambles, he’s restless,
tosses his head and swats his hand
like I’m a horse-fly round his head,
‘No use! No bloody use this time, d’you hear?’

Is he with us or on a ruddy ice-flow?
His thoughts drift back to Elephant Island
a hundred times! ‘When we made that spit
we’d not stood on mother earth for sixteen months!
Some kissed stones, some cradled pebbles

some stuffed their mouths with ice and gravel…
Poor madmen, Mrs. Crean! You’ve seen babies
stuff soil in their mouths, but not grown men, I bet?’
I weep with him. Tears running down our cheeks…

If there is any fault in this book it is that the writing is occasionally too busy and has one detail or shift too many but in such rich work this is easily forgivable. I hope Antarctica gets the attention it deserves. It reveals Dilys Wood as a poet of considerable talent.