Product Description

Blending historical, scientific, and literary scholarship with an impressive range of poetic forms, Melinda Mueller masterfully brings us the legendary tale of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition. What the Ice Gets is an adventure story, a requiem, and a love poem written to 28 heroes and the mythic landscape they set out to explore but that instead explored them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1647183 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 120 pages

From Booklist
The second expedition Sir Ernest Shackleton led to Antarctica was undertaken in a ship called Endurance . The name was prophetic, for after it became trapped in ice in January--the middle of the southern summer--the explorers had to embark over ice floes, ocean, and finally ice-clad mountains to save their lives. They left the ship as the ice began to shatter it in late October 1915. By foot and lifeboats, they reached wind-scoured Elephant Island in April 1916. From there, Shackleton and five others sailed for a whaling camp on South Georgia Island. On August 29, 1916, deep in the antarctic winter, Shackleton rescued the men on Elephant Island. All had endured. The story has been told often, first by Shackleton's South (1919), but never before in verse, though its astonishing heroism is the stuff of epics, such as the Odyssey . Mueller does the job brilliantly, alternating chapters of blank verse narration and monologues in the voices of several of the men, which she sets in metrical forms specific to their speakers. Thanks to Mueller's knack for putting direct speech and extracts from expedition members' testimonies into verse, the whole poem is gripping to the last page. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Both passionate and precise, this is a moving and powerful telling of one of the last century's greatest voyages." -- Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal

"In every culture poetry has been used to tell great stories. Not only the Greeks, but the Ainu, the Norse..." -- Gary Holthaus, from the foreword

All Well?: 21 May - 19 August 1939
Crean. County Kerry
Crean. Night Watch
Crossing To Stromness
Elephant Island: 24 April - 29 August 1916
Endurance
Into The Ice: 5 December 1914 - 25 February 1915
The James Caird: 24 April - 9 May 1916
Mcneish & Hurley
Ocean Camp: 30 October - 27 December 1915
Open Water: 9 - 15 April 1916
Orde-lees
Pressure: 16 March - 19 October 1915
Shackleton
South African Birds
Waiting Waiting Waiting: 31 December 1915 - 8 April 1916
What The Ice Gets: 23 - 29 October 1915
Wild
Worsely
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

This is the poem as survival thriller, impossible to put down. -Ray Olson -- Booklist,

About the Author
Melinda Mueller lives in Seattle, where she teaches high school biology. She has published three previous collections of poetry.

Customer Reviews

Shackleton Brought to Life
This epic poem brings Shackleton's attempt to reach the South Pole to life! Some of the chapters tell the story from the point of view of individual members of the expedition; some describe particular events. Each fact is documented. Its one thing to know that Shackleton and a part of the crew left the rest of the crew behind, and travelled 800 miles in a dory on a rescue mission. Mueller brings the situation to life, describing the plight of both the rescuers and the rescuees. And then, in a moving and haunting conclusion, she tells of some of the individual's lives after the voyage. In sum, its an adventurist's story, a naturalist's story, a poet's story. A book you will want to reread, read out loud, and give to your friends.

A stanza may be worth ten thousand words of prose.
This is a case where the economy of a well-crafted poetic line accomplishes what might take a page of prose. The imagery and emotion evoked by this slim volume more than capture the beauty and desperation experienced by Shackleton and his company. No space is wasted on mundane logistical cataloging and diary-keeping. Instead the reader is in the grip of perilous nature from beginning to end. The final section sketching the fate of the men after their great adventure on the ice shows that miraculously overcoming one peril does not innoculate you against life's other afflictions.

Great storytelling poetry
The story of Shackleton's expedition alone is an amazing one, and this telling of it does an admirable job of getting across the feelings as well as the details. Mueller mixes the men's words with her own descriptions seamlessly. She uses noteworthy quotes and adds her own with that same feel, such as when Crean recounts returning from an earlier Antarctic expedition:

"More than how you look, 'tis what
you see that changes most."
The first time I saw trees again,
they looked to me like green ghosts." (p. 18)

Overall, this is one hell of a project for a poet to take on, and she more than just does it, she does it justice. She takes not just the expedition but the broader tale of the changing world as these survivors find themselves alive but lost and passing away in a world where a World War is changing everything:

"The men whose lives Frank Wild helped to save are all
long dead. Their deaths have fallen
so far behind us they are become, as Worsley would say,
quaint." (p. 70)

This is a book well worth picking up.