A New Publication - The Night Hunter

Without any doubt the most exciting project I’ve participated in over the last year has been The Night Hunter, a work now available from Z’roah Press in New York. Roni Gross, book artist and founder of Z’roah, produces limited edition artists’ books with the sculptor Peter Schell. Gross spotted my poem ‘The Night Hunter’ when it was awarded a prize at the Norman MacCaig Centenery celebrations last year. It is an honour to be added to Z’roah’s panoply of poetic works, which includes the exquisite Radiance and Repose by Geri Gomez Pearlberg.

It has been intriguing to see my work taking on a new imaginative form. Explaining the design decisions, Gross writes:

‘The structure of the book, a palm leaf, is of east asian origin, as is the form of the poem, a pantoum. The requirements of the pantoum are that the lines repeat in a specific pattern. We felt that the reader could be cued into this pattern visually, using drawn lines whose colors repeat as the language repeats. In the abstract quality of the lines is the suggestion of a remote landscape.

‘Historically in Greenland, the lack of ordinary materials like wood and metal, and even fiber for cordage, has made materials found on the beach or acquired through trade of great value. For this work, the sculptural vocabulary was chosen from primarily found material: wild harvested dogbane for cordage, driftwood for covers, scrap metal and horse bone, scavenged wood for the game board.

‘The objects, making abstract reference to the poem, allow the reader to re-experience the poem tactilely, and also participate in the telling of the story by arranging the objects on the game board.’

These elemental materials – the stone, the steel, the bone – even the driftwood and the dogsbane cord – are a perfect physical expression of the austere Arctic environment that I had tried to capture in the poem. In Greenland, driftwood washed ashore from other lands or shipwrecks was once a valuable commodity, a means of sustaining survival. What is discovered at the harbour finds a new incarnation on unfamiliar land.

Everything about Roni Gross and Peter Schell’s production improves on and enriches the original, one-dimensional poem. I am amazed by how close they have come to expressing the unspoken intentions of the work. It has been a wonderful experience to have the words taken out of my hands and see them develop and deepen in this way.



The Night Hunter
Words by Nancy Campbell
Sculpture, design and production by Roni Gross and Peter Schell
Z’roah Press, New York, 2011
Edition limited to 28 copies, signed and numbered by the artists and writer. The deluxe edition (pictured) is priced $2,500 and the standard edition (in a Cave Paper Case) $750

Understanding Umwelt

There's a word to describe the way each species perceives the environment around it, a potent mix of sensory perception and personal history that makes an island look very different to a human and a raven. Umwelt. There are as many Umwelten as there are lifeforms. The concept, developed by the scientist Jakob von Uexküll in the early twentieth century, suggests we cannot write objectively about ‘the environment’.

Umwelt explains my presence as a temporary observer on this island, and my subjective response to its people and the landscape. As well as distinctions between species, there are also differences in environmental perception between different peoples. My sense of scale and climate was developed in a temperate region. This means I fall over a lot on the slippery ground, causing much hilarity in the village. On another level, my sensitivity to ice will never be as ingrained as that of the fisherman who steps across the floes every day to catch halibut, a job that must rank among the most dangerous in the world. His understanding of the ice is a means of self-preservation. For me, the benefits (poetic composition) are less vital.

So the working title for the poems I’m writing in Upernavik has become ‘Umwelt’. It reminds me that I am a single observer, poorly qualified to make sweeping judgements about the beautiful landscape, the history of colonialism, and the battles between global industry and indigenous life.

Before coming to Upernavik I read a good deal of poetry inspired by enthnography (I mean by ethnographic science – there’s a case for arguing that all poets are enthnographers, with their deep investigation of object and ritual). Particularly memorable was Tom Lowenstein’s Ancestors and Species. I’ve also long admired Robert Bringhurst’s translations from Haida. Both writers are experts in their subject, which is woven into their life as well as into their work. My knowledge, on the other hand, is cobbled together in a magpie manner, with an eye for sparkle and synchronicity.

A danger of writing about a very different culture is that one gets so lost in the novelty of another’s Umwelt. The poetry – like holiday photographs – relies on the exotic flavour of the subject matter, rather than anything inherently interesting or well-expressed. This literary tourism focuses on facts and names and anecdote – and the numinous quality which characterises a good poem is not caught on the negative.

To avoid complacency, I’m writing in a form that I would not have been able to use had it not been for another colonial history. The pantoum is a derived from the pantun, a Malay verse form that was introduced to Europe by the French (via Victor Hugo) in the nineteenth century. A strongly repetitive and circituitous series of interwoven quatrains, the pantoum has since been employed sparingly by other poets: perhaps the greatest tour de force I’ve read is Ashbery’s Hotel Lautréamont. The fact that I can bring a Malaysian form to bear on this cold climate surprises me almost as much as the fact that I am here myself.