My application to Arts Council England's Grants for the Arts programme for funding for the year-long project Arctic Poems: Quujaavaarssuq & the Queen of the Sea has
been successful.
This project supports the completion of my poetry collection, and an associated programme of events in London, Brighton, Oxford, Bristol and Newcastle.
This collection surveys the culture of arctic Greenland from
prehistory to the present, with a focus on the hardships experienced by
indigenous communities under colonial rule during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The poems address the tensions between modern life and traditional means
of subsistence in the Arctic, and explore themes of cross-cultural
communication, cultural and species extinction, landscape and climate change.
Many of the poems use forms that are strongly linked to oral performance such
as ballads and pantoums. The sequence entitled Quujaavaarssuq and the Queen of
the Sea retells the legendary journey of the Greenlandic
hero Quujaavaarssuq to beg forgiveness from the Queen of the
Sea, who destroyed the ice as an act of revenge on the humans who pollute
her waters.
The poems will be performed at five readings around the UK during 2014 and 2015. An associated
series of six free workshops (The Library of Ice) held in Oxford this winter will introduce new audiences to contemporary writing on
environmental themes. Details of these events will be announced over the summer.
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