Hyperboreal by Joan Naviyuk Kane (review)

HYPERBOREAL, Joan Naviyuk Kane’s second book of poetry, has garnered wide acclaim for its lyricism, arresting imagery, and compelling themes. Its awards include the prestigious Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Raised in Anchorage and trained at Harvard and Columbia, Kane is Inupiaq with ancestral roots in the Alaska Native communities of King Island and Mary’s Igloo. Her mother counts among the last bilingual speakers of the King Island dialect. In Hyperboreal, Arctic landscapes and colonial transformations of Alaska Native communities provide the subjects of poems that are powerful, rich, and formally and conceptually intricate. For Kane, writing is “a way to survive and to make sense of the tremendous pressures we see in our Inupiaq communities,” she explains in a 2013 New York Times interview. “A lot of my work is written against loss.”

The poems register loss in the entwined social, cultural, personal, and territorial dimensions of Alaska Native life. In “Disappearer,” five tercets recount deaths, including that of an “uncle struck and left to die / in rain torrential / in the road in the dark” and a “sister twenty at suicide”; the lines between stanzas themselves form a verse that ties these deaths to dislocation and social marginalization (“in a city of seven too many corners / adrift without relations . . .”). Images of fragmentation, silence, and barrenness recur throughout the collection. Even Kane’s use of Inupiaq language, one of the most striking dimensions of Hyperboreal, renders legible the dominance of English.

Yet Hyperboreal counters such figures of loss with those of continuity that connect the poems across the volume, the author to her community, and the present to the past. Recurring motifs, images, and themes—Arctic landscapes, love and restoration, mothers and children, light, water, and ice—draw together the poems across sections to create a continuous whole. Raven, center of the Inupiaq creation story, counts among these recurring figures, invoking new possibilities and beginnings. The poems themselves act as instruments of memory, recalling ancestors and places that provide the foundation of community, and they frequently draw on the Inupiaq language. The most constant themes and motifs are geographical, and the verses draw out the social meanings of land. In the poem “Nunaqtigiit,” translated in an epigraph as “people related through common possession of territory,” Kane writes, “Leaning against the stone wall ragged / I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it, / I felt, and I didn’t understand: / I am bound to everyone.” In the poems, restoration does not mitigate loss, but rather the two exist in a constant tension that animates the volume, a process in which writing plays a crucial role.

“Ugiuvak / King Island,” the final poem in Hyperboreal, reiterates the themes of dislocation and survival, voice and silence that run throughout the book. Located in the Bering Sea off the northwest coast of Alaska, King Island is Kane’s ancestral home and a place where Bureau of Indian Affairs policies virtually shattered the community. In 1959 the BIA closed the island’s school, forcing the two hundred Inupiaq residents to relocate to the mainland. Children were separated from parents, the older ones sent to boarding schools, as the community scattered. Nevertheless, King Islanders still have a distinct cultural and political identity, and many return to Ugiuvak in the summers to maintain dwellings, hunt and gather traditional foods, and renew their ties to their traditional territory. In Kane’s poem, King Island figures as a place where “The falling song of women unseen / Twists between rock spires, / Our distant island / Haunted by the numberless.” The absence of the community is registered in the presence of ghosts, their voices still heard. The poem’s final line, “Take us back,” invokes a community held together, however tenuously, by land and loss. It also becomes an imperative, a declaration of persistence and survival, brought about in part through language.