Arctic journal

by Stephen Pax Leonard

Arctic Journal grew out of twelve months of fieldwork, living in a remote corner of the Arctic in the most northern permanently inhabited settlement in the world. It is a response to an alluring polar environment and different way of life whose appeal leaves an indelible mark on the mind, changing forever one's perspective on the world. Written in large part during the dark period when there is no sun at all for over three months of the year, the poem is the product of extraordinary circumstances which allowed certain privileged insights into what is happening hamani 'down there' in the urbanised world of megacities and environmental destruction. Battling bitter cold, solitude, a wall of mistrust and the winter darkness, Arctic Journal is a chronological poem of introspection and marks the arrival of an important poet.

102 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2014

About the author

Dr Leonard is a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, the Department of Linguistics and the Scott Polar Research
Institute, all at the University of Cambridge. He is an anthropological linguist with research interests in the role
of language in the establishment of social and linguistic identities in small speech communities, the ethnography
of speaking, endangered languages and cultures, linguistic diversity and language revitalisation. His doctoral
research at the University of Oxford focused on the construction of social and linguistic identity in early Iceland,
and he has conducted sociolinguistic and ethnographic research in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. In 2010,
Dr Leonard embarked on a new project to document the endangered oral traditions and communicative
practices of the Inughuit people in northwest Greenland.