Heart of Winter

‘the vast sky opens me

its immensity
blows through me
like a wind.

It tears through me
so I tremble with joy.’

Three years in the making, Heart of Winter is a beautiful and poignant series of found poems by Autumn Richardson, assembled from the notes written by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen and botanist Dr. Thorild Wulff during the Second Thule Expedition – a journey charting a little-known area of the far north-western coast of Greenland, from April to September, 1917. Some of Rasmussen's journals were afterwards edited by himself, and published as Greenland by the Polar Sea in 1921. During this expedition they traversed a vast landscape, by foot and by sledge, travelling more than a 1000 kilometres. A large portion of their journey was spent crossing the perilous and desolate ‘inland-ice’, an earlier term for the Greenland Ice Sheet. Dr. Wulff sadly lost his life on the return journey, as did one other member of the expedition, Hendrik Olsen. Every dog they brought with them also perished.