Advance copies of 'The Library of Ice"

Book bloggers, book reviewers and journalists are invited to request their advance copies of The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate via NetGalley. Available now!

Objects for the Anthopocene

Last week ClimateCultures invited me to contribute an essay on three objects which might represent my personal timeline of the Anthropocene. You can read my watery selection here.

And for those curious for more on kayaks, over on the Waterlines blog you can read my first Canal Laureate poem.

The Polar Tombola: Exhibition

A word donated to The Polar Tombola by poet Saradha Soobrayen

If you had to lose a word from your language, what would it be?

Endangered languages and censorship are the themes of an exhibition opening on 4 September 2017 at UWE Library,  Bower Ashton, Bristol. On display is the archive of The Polar Tombola, a participatory live lit / art project with which I have toured the UK over the last two years. I've been discussing language loss with artists, writers, librarians, curators, scientists and many others, and collecting the words these individuals feel they could - or should - live without. The exhibition includes all 300+ words donated to the archive, together with texts commissioned from leading contemporary writers for the accompanying anthology A Book of Banished Words. Visitors will also be able to see the original installation, including the 'tombola' and the Greenlandic-English dictionary that inspired the project.

Special Offer! The Polar Tombola: A Book of Banished Words is available post-free within the UK for the duration of the exhibition.

The Polar Tombola runs until 31 October 2017 at Bower Ashton Library, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol, BS3 2JT. More details here.

For a full account to the project, look out for an article on The Polar Tombola in the forthcoming issue of The Blue Notebook Journal for Artists' Books.

The Polar Tombola exhibition, publication and tour were made possible with the generous support of Arts Council England Grants for the Arts.

The Polar Tombola comes to BALTIC Gateshead

What happens when a language disappears altogether? 

If you were asked to exclude just one word from your own vocabulary, what would you choose? 

Come to BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead on Saturday 18 July to answer these questions and puzzle out some new ones. The Astonishing Polar Tombola runs from noon to 3pm as part of the annual Artists' Book Market, an amazing weekend celebration of books organised by Theresa Easton. Over 40 national and regional artists will be displaying their work in the BALTIC galleries and artist-led workshops will be in progress for those who want to make a book themselves. Entry is free.

Image (c) Caspar Evans / Small Publishers Fair

The Polar Tombola welcomes players of all ages and languages. Learn a new word from an endangered Arctic language, and leave behind one of your own words in return. By playing the game you will take part in a movement to raise awareness of vulnerable languages, and your word could be included in the Anthology of Abandoned Words, published by Bird Editions in 2017.

The Polar Tombola was first performed at the Small Publishers Fair, London in 2015, and a Grant for the Arts from Arts Council England has allowed the project to tour. Look out for future events in London, Cambridge and Bristol over the following year. There's more information about the project in this post about the 2015 event.

"How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic" News

'A book that is not only beautiful but full of joy, love and quiet intensity.' 

- Oliver Clark, Collinge and Clark Rare Books, London

I'm delighted to announce that How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet is being reissued by MIEL books. This reformatted and updated version of MIEL's popular pocket edition (first published 2014) will be available in October.

Want to read more? Here's a blog post on ice and alphabets written for MIEL back when the first pocket edition came out. Or an in-depth feature article on the people behind my story, published in the Independent. And Saradha Soobrayen, poet and librarian at the Poetry Library in London, reviews the first MIEL edition here.

MIEL's first edition of How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic sold out quickly; guarantee your copy and support this amazing small press with a 2016 subscription. Can't wait until October? There are still copies of the original deluxe edition available.

Stories from the Flood

The River Coquet has a history of flooding the small Northumbrian market town of Rothbury. In 2013 Hexham Book Festival ran a project called Stories from the Flood to document the experiences of people whose lives had been affected by floods. When I visited, as Writer-in-Residence for Words Across Northumberland, sandbags (above) were still as much part of the view along the riverbank as cow parsley, and although the waters had gone down, the damage they'd caused was evident.

With new flood warnings issued for Northumberland this weekend, and terrible footage of devastation in other parts of the UK, the friends I made in Rothbury have been much on my mind. These two poems are for them.

Planning permission

It’s happening all over.

If it happens again, I’ll live upstairs –

and downstairs, I’ll cement it out.

I could even have a garden downstairs.

Selling the house is hard.

You can’t just say ‘I’m moving’

and go somewhere else

when no one wants to move in.

So I think about other things:

driving a boat instead of a car,

keeping bookshelves on pulleys,

           growing flowers in a cement garden.

A combination of things

I think it’s a combination of things

it’s climate change yes

and it’s forestry taking out too many trees

and lorries tearing down the slope with the logs on them

and the streams running straight down the hillside now

and the farmers not allowed to look after the riverbanks like they used to

not dredging, not taking the gravel out onto the bank

and all the weeds in the river

and they’re building on flood plains which they were never allowed to do before

I don’t think it is one thing

I think it is a combination of things

a combination of everything

(Published in Disko Bay, Enitharmon Press)

The Polar Tombola

‘This is the first time I’ve looked in a dictionary since my A-levels,’ confided a hipster, eagerly flicking through the yellowing pages of my Greenlandic-English dictionary.

The Astonishing Polar Tombola was operational over Friday 5 and Saturday 6 November at the Small Publishers Fair in Conway Hall, London. Helen Mitchell, the fair’s organiser, sees the venue as something of a ‘village hall for London’, and with that in mind I combined an austere arctic aesthetic with a vintage village fête look in designing the tombola.

Pete Kennedy and Catherine Polley play the Polar Tombola

Photograph: Caspar Evans / Small Publishers Fair

Tombola has its origins in the cold, dark months of the year. The game (which draws its name from the word tombolare, to tumble or turn a somersault) is inspired by the raffle played by Italian families at Christmas time, with symbolic prizes and candied peel. The Polar Tombola is likewise a game of chance, one that turns expectations upside-down, as participants are invited to pick a Greenlandic word from a giant papier-mache snowball, and discover its meaning. Players are rewarded with a Fox’s Glacier Mint rather than preserved Mediterranean fruit. 

Over the course of the fair around 100 Greenlandic words are taken from the snowball. Everyone is curious to discover the meaning of the unfamiliar word, which frequently demonstrates an eerie synchronicity with their circumstances. I begin to wonder whether I should have set up shop as a fortune teller instead...

The game is intended to highlight the fact that the West Greenlandic language (Kalaallisut) is vulnerable, according to the UNESCO Atlas of World Languages in Danger. Language is especially important in places suffering the rapid effects of climate change: how can non-native scientists hope to study the arctic ecosystem without access to the knowledge of generations enshrined in the languages of the region?

I encourage players who have picked out and learnt a Greenlandic word to leave behind a word from their own language. It’s a big commitment to vow never to use a word again (as exemplified in my book proviso), and some people decide not to play: a few punters object to such self-censorship, and others just can't decide which word to leave behind. I certainly give away more Greenlandic words than I claim English ones. While I’m secretly pleased that people want to break the rules, the notion of exchange is important to me. 

Abandoned words

Photograph: Caspar Evans / Small Publishers Fair

The words left behind make a fascinating collection, representing deeply-felt political ideologies, personal histories and aesthetic preferences. For example:

- A woman left the word describing the main symptom of her illness.

- Someone (not the hipster) left the word ‘hipster’.
- Someone left the word for loneliness in Korean.

- A conservationist who works with eels left the word ‘panda’.

- Someone left the word ‘war’.

- One printer left the word ‘bespoke’.

- Another printer left the word ‘giclee’.

- Most fittingly of all, one woman left the word for a remembered (but unheard) voice (‘as in one who is dead’) in Farsi.

Night falls, and the last word is left behind

Photograph: Caspar Evans / Small Publishers Fair

All these words are safely stored away, and will be compiled in a future catalogue on the Polar Tombola. Meanwhile, it is pleasing to think of Greenlandic words in circulation in the UK, with new ambassadors for the language such as artist Steve Perfect, who has been introducing London bartenders to that staple cocktail ingredient, kaggsuk.

Close of play

Photograph: Caspar Evans / Small Publishers Fair