Book Report: Toward Antarctica

20. Elizabeth Bradfield, Toward Antarctica: An Exploration (2019) (4/6/21)

I started this book last year as I was heading to Antarctica. But I didn't get far. Although it is beautiful— beautifully written, beautifully illustrated—I did not have the  context to appreciate it fully. In some ways I still don't, because this book, which consists of short almost–journal entries, is very much about the author's personal experience. 

Bradfield is a poet and a naturalist, and Toward Antarctica provides us with snapshots, in both words and images, of several voyages she has made to the southern continent, South Georgia Island, and the Falklands as staff on a tourist ship. In it, she adopts a form originated by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Bashō known as haibun, which combines prose and haiku. Though "prose" isn't quite accurate, for her style is quite telegraphic, requiring the reader to slow down and savor (or, sometimes, puzzle). For example, 

A gift. This. Unfair to claim & there were others and yet this gift: a minke exhales, unseen but heard. Spot its dorsal sharp among ice, in calm-silk water. Then along and under (under) my boat, eye skyward. Sea-warbled but clear. Open. Met. Calm water. Flank gold with diatoms. Still. Chunks of ice. Enough time enough weather enough whale enough boats for all on ship to muster, seek, find and not crowd. To drift as it circles, approaches, finds us approachable, re-approached. All balance, all sense, recalibrated.

stretched on low ice
ignored in near distance
a leopard seal yawns

Frequently, she also includes a footnote to clarify some historical point or other allusion within her entry. The layout is elegant, as are the (sometimes rather abstract) photographs:

My experience aboard a ship in Antarctica was different from Bradfield's, both because I wasn't staff and because our ship was very small, intimate, and we had a lot of flexibility. So I got the most out of her observations about wildlife and the places that I, too, visited: Port Lockroy, Neko Harbor, Half Moon Island, the Gerlache Strait. 

I also appreciated her epilogue, "A Letter Home," in which she asks: "Where do we source our information and how do we scrape down to the truth? How are we going to agree and make a plan to move forward, America, on this one subject in our own crowded, conflicted, contradictory, not-wholly-known land? There are so many subjects about which we are asking these questions."

This book prompted me to pull out my maps of Antarctica and recall our trip with all its glorious landings and Zodiac rides, seeing penguins, seals, whales. Now, perhaps, I should finally get around to curating the photos I took down there, and posting them. I relish the thought of a return visit, even if it is only via a screen.

Do I recommend this book? It's hard to say. As I mentioned above, I couldn't appreciate it until I myself had been to the land she describes. Even the sections about South Georgia and the Falklands were a bit of a stretch for me, though I've read about these places and seen photos, so that helped. It is a beautiful book, but it may in the end be of only limited accessibility.