The Diomedes
Summers he would sail for Alaska
working the crabbers as deckhand or galley;
autumns returning with old-weather stories of
clam catchers, fur trappers, and the twin isles
of Diomede: two miles and a continent between them;
and how, in winter, when the straits froze over,
the islanders could walk from one to the other,
crossing the sheet for family, scrimshaw,
soapstone, to marry, passing the date line
that ran through the channel, stepping
between days as they went.
As far as I know he doesn’t go back;
if he did, he’d hear that only the fearless
now track on foot, the pack no longer dependable
for walrus, ski-plane or the human step.
Even now, there’s something to his story
I find difficult to fathom. At home, in London,
listening to my neighbours’ raised voices
or catching the man opposite dressing,
I wonder what it is we will do to be neighbourly,
how part of us longs for it to matter that much,
to be willing to nudge our skin-boat into the waves,
to be between floe and another;
halfway from home, in no safety, unsure
if we’re headed for tomorrow or yesterday.
Matthew Hollis explores territories related to the four cardinal points of the compass in his recent Bloodaxe-published collection Earth House, which incudes this week’s poem, looking north from London, England, to the Bering Strait. The Diomedes of the title are two rocky islands situated between Siberia and Alaska. Big Diomede (known also as Tomorrow Isle) is Russian territory, Little Diomede (or Yesterday Isle) belongs to the US: in cold war times the sea between them was nicknamed the Ice Curtain. Big Diomede today is occupied by military units, but there’s still a small population on Little Diomede of Iñupiat, an Indigenous Alaska people known especially for their skill in ivory carving. The islands are only 2.4 miles from each other at their closest point but, measured by time, they’re 21 hours apart, being separated by the international date line.
Only the essential minimum of information is slipped into the first stanza, and its symbolic importance to the poem tactfully understated. Hollis is reticent, too, about the identity of the man whose activities the poem begins by describing (“Summers he would sail for Alaska …”) “He” might well be a neighbour in the poet’s locality. As we’ll see later, neighbours are elusive presences in the poem, and neighbourliness is a significant theme. Neighbours often guard themselves against intimacy, and even the friendliest usually has a well-edited public narrative to share with those others with whom, especially in a big city, he may feel packed a little uncomfortably.
The “old-weather stories” (significant phrase) which the retired seaman has recounted off-stage to the poem aren’t repeated, but their flavour is robustly present, salted with authentic vocabulary (“crabbers”, “deckhand”, “galley”) and reference to “clam catchers” and “fur trappers”. The excitement, for the imagined storyteller and the writer, is conveyed through some rapid parataxis – “family, scrimshaw, / soapstone, to marry”. These things, life’s tumbled, tradeable essentials, once motivated the islanders to cross on foot the ice-sheet between them, and ensured various channels of relationship were kept open.
An environmental “date line” is crossed in the middle verse. It summarises all that has changed: “only the fearless / now track on foot, the pack no longer dependable / for walrus, ski-plane or the human step”. This is the “new-weather” story, relevant to the larger concept of the neighbourly, of course. Is “the pack” simply the packed ice – or does it also connote the islanders’ social groups, similarly fractured? I think, in the internal rhymes of “back”, “track” and “pack” we hear the cracks opening between people, and between people and their environment, as well as the breaking of the ice.
The moral imperative of domestic neighbourliness is examined from a more personal angle in the last section. Mixed feelings about proximity are implied by the reference to “neighbours’ raised voices” and the sight of “the man opposite dressing”. Neighbourliness can be intrusive. But in a deeper insight, “part of us longs for it to matter that much”. Images evoked earlier in a realist manner culminate in the lovely, chilly metaphor of “be [ing] willing to nudge our skin-boat into the waves”. The poem’s closing lines, picking up on the informal names of the two islands, “tomorrow” and “yesterday”, amplify a conflict between progress and retreat which has psychological and environmental resonance.
Hollis’s collection is impressively structured, each of its four sections composed as an itinerary that always comes “home” to anchor in an original translation from the Exeter Book. The places and insights the poet experiences at the cardinal points are fluid, interconnected, never insular. Longlisted for the 2023 Laurel prize, Earth House represents the ecological imagination at its most multi-layered and persuasive.
• Earth House by Matthew Hollis is published by Bloodaxe. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
