The Ice Decides: Poems of Antarctica
Published by Finishing Line Press, 2012
The Ice Decides
The ice decides
where I can go.
The ice divides
life from death,
safe passage from abyss.
But it is the light
on the ice that defines
beauty, terror, silence,
the blue awe of Antarctica.
Description
Following in Coleridge’s footsteps, Karla Linn Merrifield takes readers to the ends of the earth – to the world of albatrosses – and penguins and whales – in The Ice Decides: Poems of Antarctica, a journey of beautiful Antarctic discoveries.
In this new collection of poems, her seventh, Karla Linn Merrifield brings to life the extraordinary landscape of the South Pole with vibrant imagery and the authentic voice of a poet who traveled the continent’s landscape of snow and ice.
If you’ve been lucky enough to visit the Antarctic, you’ll know exactly what Karla Linn Merrifield is talking about in these lovely poems. And if you haven’t, you’ll know too—because they’re precise, powerful, full of depth.
– Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, Enough and Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future; founder of 350.org, the grassroots climate campaign
Karla Linn Merrifield’s poems in The Ice Decides explore the “something else” revealed in her journey to Antarctica– the blue awe that is “the same blue, the truest blue/ of the ten-thousand blues of that blue continent./ I can see it now: the blue that does not fade.” These poems rise to the demanding beauty of a place few have seen– allowing us to partake in her discoveries that are mythical, spiritual and, at times, whimsical.
