Toward Antarctica

Toward Antarctica is an innovating lyric travelogue of photographs and writing by poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield. A book that challenges, documents, and queries one of the most iconic wild corners of the world, any reader with a passion for poetry and worldly excursions will delight in Bradfield’s ecotour of Antarctica.

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*Selected as a Top 10 Must-Read Book About Antarctica by the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators



Poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s fourth collection, Toward Antarctica, documents and queries her work as a guide on ships in Antarctica, offering an incisive insider’s vision that challenges traditional tropes of The Last Continent. Inspired by haibun, a stylistic form of Japanese poetry invented by 17th-century poet, Matsuo Bashō to chronicle his journeys in remote Japan, Bradfield uses photographs, compressed prose, and short poems to examine our relationship to remoteness, discovery, expertise, awe, labor, temporary societies, “pure” landscapes, and tourism’s service economy. Antarctica was the focus of Bradfield’s Approaching Ice, written before she had set foot on the continent; now Toward Antarctica furthers her investigation with boots on the ground. A complicated love letter, Toward Antarctica offers a unique view of one of the world’s most iconic wild places.