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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 6

Journey, www.unipka.ca. The anthropological writings by Boas and Rasmussen at least a century earlier are another source. Taken together these stories, garnered from elders across large territories, can differ from each other in incidental detail and, just sometimes, on larger parts of a story. This has set a challenge for a poet attempting a straight line in the poetic sequence, so much so that sometimes I have resisted the straight line altogether, allowing the discontinuities to offer a breathing pause in the general flow. Through Ronald King I was introduced to Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten’s The Sea Woman: Sedna in Inuit Shamanism and Art in the Eastern Arctic, which has become another vital guide in my understanding of Inuit cultures.There is no single Sedna or Kiviuq story – they are stories which are as alive as some still believe Sedna and Kiviuq may be alive – and to be alive means to change, to be contradictory, to be individual, to be social, even to be mercurial. Storytelling of the kind witnessed in such accounts, and which is fundamental to the transmission of the stories down the generations, is an extremely sophisticated art. Its enduring power is testified to by the detailed survival of these tales over what is likely to be thousands of years. Clearly the poetry inscribed in this published book is at several major removes from the original stories which inspired it. The poetry is no substitute for the stories, in the way that a religious painting would be no substitute for the sacred story it tries to depict (I think of north European paintings of the Renaissance period trying to stretch back well over a thousand years to imagine scenes from the New Testament, itself a written text trying to reach back to the spoken words of Christ, who, an Aramaic speaker living close to the southern Mediterranean, would not have spoken as a first language the Greek which the New Testament ‘witnesses’ him in. Yet who would gainsay the sincerity of the painter, or their ability to 7

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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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