The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (review)

Language and landscape perform a complex dance for dominance in many of the poems in Joan Kane’s first collection, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife. The poet challenges herself to find the exact words to “recite the ice” (3). There are a handful of historical poems in the collection, including the title poem, but otherwise very little in the way of story. Humanity itself is represented mostly by relics, fragments, “tailings”—as if humans had already disappeared from the planet, leaving behind only fossils to compete with those from other vanished species, like the “petrifying blue” tusk that is all that is “left of the mammoth” (24, 11). The lines and stanzas are short, the syntax abrupt, with sometimes more than one sentence in a short line, and many of the sentences are fragments. The words Kane chooses—brux, sinnet, os, vivianite, ledum, stative—are themselves exotic fossils, revealing their origins in dead languages.

The sense I got of the poet as scientific explorer was so powerful that the rare personal moments were startling. A disembodied first person appears often, but in “Exit Glacier” when I came across the lines, “It follows, as surely as I / Had wanted to reach you: / Protected by a thing deeper / Than affection, more jagged,” I was made uncomfortable by the relative intimacy of the rare second person (25). Kane’s poetry reminds me of Laura Riding’s: deeply philosophical, always aware of its status as a linguistic object, pushing the borders of meaning, searching for the place where myth and memory meet. Her biographical note describes her as “Irish and Inupiaq Eskimo,” with degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and the book is dedicated “For my family / For the memory of my grandmothers / taimani qauqrirugut.” Her rural Alaskan upbringing is vividly evoked in the second half of the book, which includes the narrative poems. But especially in the first half, she is reaching out to select readers far beyond Alaska. The title poem for that first section is “Antistrophic,” and I think the turn being made is from west to east, New World to Old World, the memories of childhood making their way to the light through adopted European language. As the sun sets and “shadows cast upwards bough upon bough,” the poet struggles with “the old habit of imperfect definition” (34). The poet must imperfectly define the meaning of our daily lives. How do we grow and change (“I have played with the skulls of seals” [44])? What does our food say about us (“let us turn the intestines inside out / and eat them” [21])? Why do we make art (“The carving in my hand / Shows half-walrus, half-bear. / They must turn always / From each other” [49])? It is a pleasure and a challenge to ponder Kane’s answers to such questions through the juxtapositions of a book-length collection.