Disappearing into Ice

Throughout poetry metaphor has been wrung-out, extracted, mined and now lies fallow, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Poetry has been forever moving towards greater vehicles of expressing emotion and existence, and as a result risen above the banal nature of metaphor as a novel poetic device. This is not to say it is not utilized, for contemporary poets find power in the juxtaposition of the surreal or subconscious as a poetic agent. Yet metaphor, in its lyric sense and history cannot stand alone.

To me, Elizabeth Bradfield's Approaching Ice could not free itself from the omnipresent and overexposed use of ice as a poetic metaphor. The most unrelenting metaphor can be seen in her series of poems spread throughout the book titled, "Notes on Ice in Bodwitch." In what was at first a refreshing utilization of unconventional text, using the glossary of terms from Nathanial Bodwitch's The American Practical Navigator,Bradfield used these terms in weak reference to her personal life. For instance:

ice bridge. 1. Surface river of ice of sufficient thickness to impede

or prevent navigation. 2. An area of fast ice between the mainland and

nearby inhabited islands used in winter as a means of travel.

Barrier and pathway. It's love that makes me so full of fury, so

unable to be tender.

Here, Bradfield's description of a thing of fury could break free from convention but instead it is tied to this overarching theme of ice. This furious love, a material rich with poetic potential is indelibly linked to the tiresome metaphor of an "ice bridge." The poems themselves don't seem to run away from this entrapment.

Similarly to her attachment of metaphor, Bradfield's use of history becomes equally sedentary and flat. The poems, which required a great deal of historical research on polar explorers seem so rooted in the past that when applied to more current, pressing emotion, they fall back and lose their strength. The fact that they are indeed not Bradfield's makes such a correlation between historical account and personal emotion weakens the poignancy of Bradfield's own reflections. For example her poem, "The Third Reich Claims Neu Schwabenland" juxtaposes an account of Nazi Germany "claiming" Antarctica and a personal diatribe on "claiming." While on the exterior both serve to address the pertinent question of identity and possession, by placing such emphasis on the historical the humanity within Bradfield's personal conflict loses its foundation. Here is the Nazi description of "possession":

Ice is not land, so how to claim it?

...

The planes Passat and Boreas were catapulted

from the chill deck of the Schwabenland

into the frigid, uncharted air.

Shouldered with Bradfield's:

Is this dog mine? She has begun.

some nights, to growl, low and defiant,

when I move her from the couch, hers.

I recognize Bradfield's argument, in the same vein as the Native Americans, that land, or identity, cannot be owned. However her method for detailing it loses some humanity in its correlation to history.

Throughout Bradfield's channeling of polar explorers I yearned for a new search for self and came up empty-handed, holding onto barren metaphor and icy humanity. While Bradfield scours the historical ice and elements of the antarctic her poetry becomes more detached from exploration itself. To be frank, how far can an allegorical poem of Ernest Shackleton take the discovery and articulation of our current existence?