Drift Ice

by Jennifer Atkinson

Drift Ice is a collection of poetry from a new Etruscan author, Jennifer Atkinson. The poems in Drift Ice view the natural world through a lens of ecological and spiritual concerns. They focus especially on Prince William Sound in Alaska fifteen years after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, Long Island Sound at the estuarial mouth of the Connecticut River, and Sri Lanka before (and, in one poem, after) the tsunami. The poems address the myth of a once pristine wilderness and the indifferent, ever-changing nature of “nature” and our human place in it, as they also investigate the flexibility and lambency of lyric form.

Jennifer Atkinson is the author of two collections of poetry—The Dogwood Tree, which won the University of Alabama Poetry Prize, and The Drowned City, winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in many leading journals and have been honored with Pushcart Prizes. She taught in Nepal and Japan and at the University of Iowa and Washington University before joining the faculty of George Mason University.

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2008

About the author

Apart from Drift Ice (Etruscan Press, 2008), Jennifer Atkinson is the author of two collections of poetry: The Dogwood Tree (University of Alabama Press, 1990), which won the University of Alabama Poetry Prize, and The Drowned City (Northeastern University Press, 2000), winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in many leading journals and have been honored with Pushcart Prizes. She taught in Nepal, in Japan, at the University of Iowa, and at Washington University before joining the faculty of George Mason University.

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably one of my favorite books of poetry. I love how Atkinson captures the natural world.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many will admire Atkinson's craft resources: a rich lexical fount from botanical, art historical, and oceanographic lore. This lore troubles Atkinson, however, as it signals to her her own (as she sees it) over-reliance on knowledge, and the book chronicles at least two and possibly three trips to geographically extreme regions of the world - the Himalayas, and Alaskan artic - that require of her that she make her lore available to understanding the sublime in the landscape.

This in turn requires that the music be less dense than in the first two Atkinson collections, the syntactical awareness distributed now into the sentence (and not the meter), as in this loosely pentameter couplet, a compound-periodic sentence narrating an extreme experience while snorkeling: "It must have happened gradually, but all at once/She realized she was numb, or more like numbed." The parallelism in the clauses (from the poem "Keenness") suggests correspondence between gradual realization and the recognized "lostness" of the gradualization. The peril of "keenness," which in the collection's opening poem is located in Frost's counsel to "Drink and be whole again beyond confusion," is that it's a Mickey Finn, not unlike the drink that (in the possibly scapegoating allegation) retired into amazement the captain of the Exon-Valdez ship which rammed into an Arctic Glacier and changed inalterably the ecology of the Arctic.

Frost's craft knowledge, then, able, as Allison Funk reminds us (on the book's back cover), to "impress the winds and streams into service" is called into question by a larger awareness of how poetry in the Frostian-pastoral line has reduced the craft to inebriation, a god to purchase venery. There is riveting critique of contemporary poetry in that insight, but where you find it in Atkinson's book it seems to be in the prose poems, the imitations of Gary Snyder ("The Moon Dissolves in the Afternoon Sky Like An Aspirin" - c.f. Snyder's "Little Songs for Gaia") in Atkinson's striking formal inventions ( the Mandalas, the "Hollow Tree Canon,"), and modal hybrids, e.g., the maritime-pastorals ("Afloat, Just Thinking", "Mare Incognita"). Surprisingly, it's not in the poems witnessing ecological destruction at Prince William Sound, which are more oracular and canny than moralizing. There is a large ethical imagination at work here, and a formal mastery nearly everywhere engaged at the tip of thought.