The Woman Who Went to the Moon

Poems of Igloolik

Rosemary Clewes

• Publisher: Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781771333856
• eBook ISBN:
  9781771333863
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Woman Who Went to The Moon captures in poems, six days spent in the tiny community of Igloolik in the Arctic winter of January 2006. Ice-locked to the Melville Peninsula, Igloolik lies west of Baffin Island. This is the year of the Circumpolar Moon, where the full moon sweeps the heavens at the lowest point of its curve in its 18.6-year cycle. The poems are suffused with its light and the slow ebb of its celestial brightness in the days that follow, as the sun for first time in four months creeps over the horizon, heralding the approach of spring. The poems weave women's igloo art, a community's grief for teenage suicides, the immensity of landscape, and the tension between the Elder's intuition and the outsiders' science. Shifting between mythic tale-telling and the vibrancy of town life, these poems will speak to those for whom body, soul, and naming are not divisible.

A Day on the Land

Close Up

I.

Closing in by dogsled

the fishing hut

insubstantial

in the pencilled light—

remove the eaves and right angles

rimed in snow

I could have walked right through—

out the other side.

II.

A bowhead’s skull

propped vertical

on the ice-packed shore—

a winter gym for kids

or a behemoth’s tombstone.

Rite of Passage

III.

Aaju tells me to have a pee.

Empty kidneys cure cold feet.

Is she pulling my leg?

I unzip layers on the double

lunge for the door

gulp cold & squat

whizzing my yellow mark on the white immense.

Fingers throb my ass banks its fire—

It’s the fat, she tells me. Aaju

whose Greenlandic cheeks

are round.

Fish Hut

IV.

Blue flames from the propane stove hiss emitting only token

heat in the fish hut we’ve come to after our dogsled adventure

across the white plain. We are what moves out here, plumped

like birds warming air between their feathers: headgear, big

in the odd ways of tasselled hats and balaclavas while our

ungloved hands hug the hot mugs of chocolate poured from

thermoses. None of this helps my frozen left foot jammed

into my Sorel boot. Unlike our chatter vapourizing in the mist

above our heads, I am peg legged, my foot a gravid flunky,

anchored to the floor.

Older women love young men.

Secretly our hearts leap when they smile at us, our fingers

itching to touch the down on their arms—the nape. We like to flirt, triumphant ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Anticipating North
• January
• Dark Descending
• Igloolik
• A Pale Thing
• If I Lived Here
• I Need
• Circumpolar Moon
• Dawn
• Only Qallunaat
• Twenty Names
• Witness
• The Sun and the Moon
• The Moon and the Sun
• Land Claim
• Ruth
• A Day on the Land
• Iglu
• Patak’s Drumming Lesson
• Epilogue
• Notes and Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author