This is a narrative poem, one that tells a story or focuses more on the events being described than on the speaker’s feelings in reaction to those events. As such, it allows for the passage of time rather than arresting us in one dramatic moment.

There is a long tradition of writing poems in praise of specific individuals, typically epic heroes in ancient times but more and more about ordinary people in contemporary times.

I knew Yiddish was exquisitely expressive, with a particular affinity for proverbs and curses and jokes, and more words for “fool” than Hawaiians have for lava or the Inuit people for snow. I had no idea of the wealth of its poetry.

The larger question driving the poems of "Approaching Ice," which examines the lives of many historic polar explorers, was to figure out just this: why they went. Why, knowing the difficulties, did they go?

The poem is more broadly about the struggle of the speaker to separate from her mother and be born as an individual, and of course, about the same conflict confronted by all mothers and daughters throughout time.

The poem’s opening introduces a wonderful pun—the word “seems.” It’s a kind of doubling that characterizes the poem as a whole, and through it we come to see sewing a seam as a metaphor for something larger—the domestic life, the life relegated to women as a whole in the nineteenth century.

I find today’s poems marvelously lyrical and experiential—phrases like “sweet deviant chant,” “less the nuance,” and “suave hours” give sharp delight in their sound and sense.