corpse whale by dg nanouk okpik (review)

While I was searching the library stacks for a book on ecological poetics, dg nanouk okpik's corpse whale caught my eye. A whale, a corpse? I took it off the shelf and opened it to a poem named "Drying Magma Near Illiamna." "We lying in the onyx rain by garnet-cloaking icebergs," it asserts, and it mentions watching polar bears and watching puffins "with nests / filled with ruby eggs of egrets." The complexities of clause, lineation, and white space between words and stanzas are almost immediately subsumed by black and red—gemlike rain, bloodied ocean water obscured by green and blue ice, petrified mountain architecture, fluorescing eggs. okpik's film-negative imagery evokes the still-pluming and glacier-covered Mount Iliamna volcano in a region of Alaska that has been a locus for precontact to present-time Indigenous settlements and is now a contested site for open-pit mine development. In between these historical moments the speakers of the poem "lurk and twitch blood gales" as geological time surges and recedes. "Trails of sea cows reach the mountains / with meltwater draining off the peaks," and Alyeska "dissolves in mud" while the speakers "live in earth mounds" that "mutate into slat board" and "quiver into the sea." The poem ends with images that fuse past and present, flesh and stone: "Serpentine / women touch minerals of DNA to gather strength."

As I read through the rest of the collection, I debated whether okpik's imagery is surrealistic or mythopoeic. I found myself looking up information on geology and geography; shamans; whales, polar bears, and sea birds; multiply-named and multiply-souled agents human, animal, and otherwise; features of Inupiatun grammar; environmental rights. So I think the book is both surreal and mythic; it is complex, recondite, knowledgeable, passionate. As I continue to read about historical and spiritual features of Inuit culture, I realize more and more that okpik's poems offer a course in a way of being that is utterly inimitable, steeped as it is in her life experiences and studies. Her epigraphs, glossary, and profoundly vivid vocabulary throughout demonstrate the hard work she puts into her poetry and the hard work required to interpret her poetry.

"The greatest peril of life lies in the fact human food consists entirely of souls," runs the first of two epigraphs (the words are Buster Kailek's). The second, from a shaman named Orpingalik, concludes, "When the words we want to use shoot up of themselves—we get a new song." Although okpik's poems are densely learned solutions to complex problems, they are also instantly compelling songs. As I read over the pages, ocean and ice, pharynx and marmot, skin boat and meteor, whalebone and cyberspace, squid poison and tundra, Gilgamesh and Sarah Palin, fireweed and frog precipitate in the mind and insinuate themselves into the mouth. The poems, which combine Inuit with Euro-American bodies of knowledge, are punctuated by the twelve months of the Roman calendar translated into Inupiatun moons; each of these moon-poems transmits and transmutes lore. "Suvluravik Tatqiq," for example, is the "May / Moon When the Rivers Flow"; the month evokes the "Edible Ice Worm / Moon when fawns are born" in a way that mimics "her/my plasma made of stag beetles lily flowers." The "her/my" construction is common in many of okpik's poems; the poet-speaker's voice is often tandem, operating in both the first person and third person to uncanny effect.

She and I, I and she: the greater one's body of awareness, the more apparent the visionary and deeply analogical sense of okpik's poems becomes. For example, in one of the major poems in okpik's collection, "For the Spirits-Who-Have-Not-Yet-Rounded-the-Bend," the poet-speaker is "dancing in the midnight sun not for law, or man, but for whale and blood." Whales and blood have their own rationalities, their own...