This collection surveys the culture of arctic Greenland from prehistory
to the present, with a focus on the hardships experienced by indigenous
communities under colonial rule during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The poems address the tensions between modern life and
traditional means of subsistence in the Arctic, and explore themes of
cross-cultural communication, cultural and species extinction, landscape
and climate change. Many of the poems use forms that are strongly linked
to oral performance such as ballads and pantoums.