The Lakes of Mars (Electronic book text)

The Lakes of Mars is a stunning new collection of poems by Chris Orsman that follow on from his most recent book, South: An Antarctic Journey, a sequence about Captain Scott s final expedition to Antarctica. These new poems are a characteristic mix of thoughtful reflection and precise imagery of landscape and object. Chris Orsman captures the plainness of life with a visual clarity, but always pushes his descriptions further, broadening the poems into intellectual and moral meaning . He is also particularly good at vividly recreating historical moments, while evoking the gifts and loss of the past. The first part of The Lakes of Mars encompasses the Wellington hills; a wonderful long poem of the camera and its nostalgia, Instamatic; the light art of Bill Culbert; and a total stock of words . The second and third parts, The Lakes of Mars and The Book of the Dead, were inspired by Orsman s 1998 trip to the Antarctic as inaugural recipient of an Artists to Antarctica Fellowship. The New Zealand Antarctic poem is now a settled form, but Orsman was one of its originators and, as these poems prove, a true master of it. The poems in The Lakes of Mars are distinctive, scrupulous, splendid they have much to offer an attentive reader."