Finding Meteorites in Antarctica
- Jul 16
- 2 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
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The concept—let alone the reality of—human habitation on Antarctica is as familiar to me as is human habitation on Mars. That is, for most of us, aside from news about our southernmost continent’s rapidly melting glaciers and collapsing ice shelves, or documentaries about its penguin colonies, both are little understood and are mostly the stuff of science fiction. Paul Brooke’s new poetry collection, Finding Meteorites in Antarctica, manages to make this otherworldly subject simultaneously more knowable and more mysterious.
The 39 poems herein (including in Morse code and braille) utilize a novel 10-syllable meterless rhyme scheme—aaabcccbaaaa—based on the way bodies are regulated by circadian rhythms. In Antarctica, this is represented by three months of continuous daylight, one month of twilight, three months of continuous darkness, another month of twilight, and four months of continuous daylight. The effect of this format, poem after poem, creates a sense of the repetitiveness that living on the coldest, driest, and windiest place on Earth must be like, while, unconventionally, Brooke finds novel ways to keep the scheme fresh across the collection.
I entered Finding Meteorites in Antarctica knowing little about this polar desert, and left mesmerized not just by Antarctica’s history or what happens or is found there, but by the way in which Brooke made it both knowable—with intention, with care, and, above all else, with curiosity—while employing a vernacular that kept it wonderfully unknowable: “Katabatic winds,” “Polar T Syndrome,” “hoosh,” “DOMs,” “blazar,” “cryosphere,” “ambulacral grooves,” “pulpitums,” “methyl mercury,” “holotypic reign,” “tuffaceous siltstones.”
Rare is the book that inspires the desire to experience first-hand the place it’s written about. Rarer still is the book about a place so few of us will ever get to know first-hand. Returning to Finding Meteorites in Antarctica again and again, I am transported there anew: I am one of those intrepid travelers of yore, one of those doomed adventurers, one of those resilient scientists, one of those winterovers driven mad by the long, dark isolation.
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