Tom Lowenstein: Ancestors and Species –New & Selected Ethnographic Poetry
Published October 2005
Paperback, 154pp, 9x6ins, £9.95 / $16
ISBN 9780907562740
Tom Lowenstein's work as poet and as ethnographer (specialising, above all, in the Inuit of Alaska) has always been interpenetrative, the poetic work deeply informed by the scholarly. This volume selects poetry from his whole career to date, concentrating on the faultline where his ethnographic concerns meet his poetic concerns. Ancestors and Species makes it clear that Tom Lowenstein is one of Britain's most remarkable poetic voices, fascinating and impossible to categorise.
'Tom Lowenstein is an original among young British poets — quite exceptionally gifted. . .' Ted Hughes wrote in 1980.
Part 1 of this selection comes from Filibustering in Samsara, published by The Many Press in 1987. Part 2 contains the poems from Ancient Land : Sacred Whale that evoke hunting ritual, shamanistic initiation and the Inuit whale cult. The final section draws from a long poem-in-progress – part comedy, part meditation – based on the author's experience in northwest Alaska in the mid-1970s.
The young anatkuq stands gazing at the plovers.
'I wonder what it's like, right now,' he mutters,
'up there cheeping in the broad heaven?'
And at once his mind is flocked up with the migrants,
dissolving his bones in a wide airy circle, leaving his skin with us.
'It is they who have come to investigate me',
you realise after a slow interval,
'setting their camp-house in my path
in the knowledge that I would discover them.'
*
'Then we have been wondering,' the woman said — she'd watched me as
I'd stumped
against the wind, flew back in its current
and struggled at my door
with cardboard matches dying in the wind to thaw the padlock —
'We have wondered what sort of man you
are, or might be?'
'What sort?' I considered. Not personal history, character and motivation.
She means 'kind' or 'species':
my range, behaviour, patterns of feeding.
How I would mate. My migratory habits . . .
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