Night Orders: Poems from the Arctic and Antarctic

by Jean McNeil

In 2005-6 Jean McNeil spent three months in the Antarctic as the recipient of the British Antarctic Survey/Arts Council of England International Fellowships to write a contemporary literary novel set in the Antarctic, published as The Ice Lovers (2009). This collection of poems and photographs also comes from her visit. Vivid, immediate, these poem-sequences are 'verbal photographs of essentially mysterious places', where the 'polar night teaches that to know light you must also know darkness'. In Night Orders the novelist's eye for telling detail marries with a keen ear for patterns of sound. McNeil's often daring imagery and willingness to trust the music of poetry is perfectly suited to her task of mapping in language these extraordinary worlds.

86 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2012

About the author

Jean McNeil is the author of ten books including four novels and a collection of short fiction. Her work has been short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Journey Prize, and she has won the Prism International prize for short fiction and subsequently for narrative non-fiction. She is the co-director of the Masters in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia and lives in London, England.