Corpse Whale (Volume 73) (Sun Tracks)

While looking for a few words to accompany a photo of umiaks (seal skin whaling boats) framed in Northern Lights I'd made a few years ago, I came across these lines from okpik's poem "Tulunigraq: Something Like a Raven": Quarrtsiluni sitting in silence where all things and all beings reach back into time before iron and oil.Okpik arranges her images across the page in a manner that forces the reader to go slowly, to breathe slowly, to see, and to hear, and I felt myself being taken back - to Alaska's North Slope, to the village of Point Hope and to other places I'd been in the far north, and then further back, to places I had never been - to old Tikigaq, to villages and settings scattered across Alaska and Greenland and beyond, to a time, indeed, "before iron and oil." Okpik's writing is sure and precise, at times reminiscent of carefully sifting through an archeological dig, anticipating what might be found, in awe of what is found. The culture she invites the reader into is one of myth-making, spirituality, subsistence hunting and gathering, veneration of elders and ancestors and a closeness to sinew and cold. The landscape is one of ice and sea, of magma cooling, the vast sweep of the tundra. Threaded through this are spirits and caribou, whales and ground squirrels, edible plants and seal oil lamps, Eucharist wafers and hooligan jigs. Okpik has given us poems that take us to places and to times few of us have experienced or will experience. The journey is mesmerizing.

fabulouse

Her work is amazing.