Clearly, and malignly, key decisions are reserved for men. The tales pull no punches in describing how fraught with the jeopardy of violent misogyny such a society can, at its worst, be. Yet they also prod and jab at the problem of individualism within a society which only has so much room for ‘free will’. In any case, these are ancient stories and– bearing in mind the fuzzing of mythic and realistic modes we should be sensitive to in folk tales – the social norms they seem to imply are as long gone in Inuit cultures as any other (if they are long gone in other cultures…)

Perhaps it is actually best ‘not to read’ these tales when reading them: I can only encourage readers first to enjoy them, absorb them, take them in, rather than ‘read’ in the moral or literary sense, as a person might engage with any novel or film or song, taking in the story and the manner of its delivery– as you would horror, adventure, fantasy, tragedy, magic – in a spirit of receptivity which will judge only in that direct, fastmoving way any audience has in the moment. Let snagging analysis and judgement come later, if they must.

To that end I’ve tried to make these poems deliver something analogous to what I understand as the enigma and the energy of the originals, while also inevitably being different and other. There is no sense in which this book is a translation. Instead, this is a book of poems which take inspiration from prose texts published in English based on many Inuit-language versions of tales which were first rendered live hundreds and hundreds of years ago, as oral, told, stories. They are still rendered that way – in fact, more than rendered, that is what they are.

I have been especially inspired by the tales gathered from some forty elders in the first decade of the twenty-first century in the Kiviuq project, which Kira Van Deusen’s team embarked on, and which she so illuminatingly documents and reflects upon in Kiviuq: An Inuit Hero and His Siberian Cousins. These are collected in the beautifully realised website Kiviuq’s

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