Caroline Gill, who currently lives in Suffolk, grew up in London, Kent and Norfolk before moving with David, her archaeologist husband, to Rome, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge and Swansea. She graduated in Classical Studies from Newcastle University in 1982 and gained a PGCE from the University of Exeter. She has worked as a teacher and tutor, and a cataloguing assistant at Churchill College, Cambridge. Polar Corona is her third publication, after The Holy Place (Seventh Quarry Press, in conjunction with Cross-Cultural Communications, New York, 2012), a poet-to-poet chapbook shared with John Dotson, and Driftwood by Starlight (Seventh Quarry Press, 2021). She has been the recipient of many prizes, and Polar Corona was the winning entry in a challenge organised by Hedgehog Poetry Press.

The inspiration behind this collection arose following Gill’s enrolment on a short course-cum-residency in 2014 at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) and Polar Museum in Cambridge under the auspices of the Poetry School. During her time at the institute, she became interested in the art of English explorer and ornithologist Dr Edward Adrian Wilson, and in particular, his 1911 image of a lunar corona at Cape Evans. She was also drawn to his sketches of penguins. Wilson, the first physician to reach the South Pole, died aged 39 on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, with Captain Scott in 1912.

The cover image by Nick Dale is of an Adélie penguin jumping between two ice flows. These penguins acquired their name from the French Antarctic explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville, who on discovering these sea birds in 1840 decided to name them after his wife, Adéle. The scientific name for the Adélie penguin is Pygoscelis adeliae. Pygoscelis means ‘rump-legged’, but the genus is better known as 'brush-tailed penguins'. They are usually found within the limits of the Antarctic icepack.

Gill’s use of the word ‘corona’ in the title of this collection focuses on its literal meaning of ‘crown’. The crown she has in mind is a corona of sonnets and here she acknowledges John Donne’s sonnet cycle, ‘La Corona’, as an inspiration in terms of the interlinked circular form. (The final line of each of Gill’s sonnets is repeated as the first line of the next one until the final poem brings us back full circle to where we began). The sequence is prefaced by a quotation from Psalm 107: ‘They that go down to the sea in ships…’

In this sequence, Gill pays close attention to symmetry and form. The opening and closing sonnets are written in memory of Dr Edward Wilson and his companions, and Sir Edward Shackleton and his crew respectively. All seven sonnets follow the pattern of three stanzas of four lines, each followed by a concluding couplet. Her use of rhyme and half-rhyme is seamless throughout. The title of each poem is just one word which, in itself, concentrates the mind and arrives at the essence contained within.

The poems bring to life the astonishing beauty of the Antarctic and the vulnerability of the penguins who, with the added threat of climate change, live out their perilous existence. In ‘Flippers’ she writes that ‘‘these flightless penguins waddle to the sea / and weather storms by huddling in a mass … The adults aim to see their offspring thrive; / how many incubated eggs are kept alive?’’

The changing seasons and the inherent risks they bring are captured succinctly in ‘Afloat’:

 

     The pack ice melts as seasons turn once more

     and penguins swim beyond their barren coast.

     Winds bellow and converge from south and east

     as realms of land and ocean start to blur.

     The youngsters dive by instinct for their fish;

     survival overtakes all other aims

     as flippers tackle underwater streams,

     where currents pull, creating swirls of wash.

 

There can’t be many poems that cover this terrain. To have a whole sequence of them is surely a delight.

 

Caroline Gill, Polar Corona, The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 7.99