Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica

In Peregrinatio, poet Gloria Heffernan's "sacred journey" to Antarctica paradoxically bestows on her the roles of "witness... trespasser...messenger [and]...pilgrim." Surrounded by humpback whales, penguins, skuas, krill, albatross, ice, and-of course-history, she confronts what the world is both with and without us. In part, Peregrinatio is an environmental treatise. In these poems, we experience "a volcano...only playing dead...[and a] beach [as] museum of decomposition." Everywhere, it seems, are "ghosts of whalers" where "a ruptured cruise ship/hemorrhages black ooze," and humans continue to "play at danger." However, as these poems attest, here also is a world of wonder and epiphany, a "voyage into the unknown/where miracles still abound." How to reconcile the two? In poem after poem, Gloria Heffernan invites us to examine with her this perplexing dichotomy.

-Marjorie Maddox, author of Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises



What a consolation and joy to read and ponder every last one of the poems in Gloria Heffernan's new collection, Peregrinatio. And what a gift, as she graciously brings the reader along on this journey to the Antarctic, a world few of us will ever visit, as this pilgrim has, crossing its choppy waters and observing the humpback whales, penguins, seals, petrels, the black brow albatrosses, caracara vultures, the brightness and the pitch black dark...and, yes, the litter we leave behind: the empty stations, the ship wrecks, the oil spills, those dreaded manmarks which are the inevitable graffiti of our species. But it is the splendor and the glory and beauty that she gifts us with, this emissary of that sacred world.

-Paul Mariani, author of All That Will Be New



In Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica, Gloria Heffernan offers her awe, her rage, and her humility as she grapples with our escalating environmental crisis. Within the setting of a trip to Antarctica, she is both witness and trespasser-revealing in vivid and forthright poems the mystery and majesty of a "landscape like / something that crash landed / from another planet."

-David Lloyd, author of Warriors