Authors
Stef Craps
Publication date
2020
Journal
American Imago
Volume
77
Issue
1
Pages
1-7
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Description
Marybeth Holleman’s poem “How to grieve a glacier,” published in ISLE in 2019, starts by noting the difficulty if not absurdity of the process the title promises to guide the reader through. After all, as a non-human entity, a glacier is an unusual object of affection:“It’s not something you can hold in your arms./You can’t rock with its image in a blanket/and keen away the nearing pain”(Holleman, 2019, p. 441). Even so, the speaker insists,“I do love this blue-white giant,/and grieve its leaving,” though she admits that her grief is mingled with excitement at witnessing the sublime spectacle of glacier calving:“I thrill to watch/thunderbolts of ice crash into azure seas”(Holleman, 2019, p. 441). Painfully aware that “it is leaving, abandoning us/to what our kind has created” and that “its gift of rarified water/will only bring more sorrow,” as sea-level rise caused by climate change-induced glacier melt is expected to have dramatic …
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