Story Hunger (Poetry of Alaska)

"The country up here is not creatures, wooded, tangled wild. It is absence wild." -- Jack Gilbert. This is the realm of Jerah Chadwick's poetry - the wild absences of the Aleutian landscape, the deep absences of vanished people, and our own groping efforts to understand ourselves, our place, and our history. Story Hunger journeys into the profound silences before and after our stories are told - from white landscape to intimate fireside. Chadwick is a story-teller for the silent:

Look for her in the white
spaces between his words, a moon
known only by reflection, her story
a glimpse of all those disappeared.
(The Mad Woman of Amlia) He is a singer of times of unexpected awareness when the land shows us metaphors which are told as stories to ourselves, and those we love: ...That sky
is inside me now.
It is all I have to say to you.
(Letter)
Story Hunger crosses seascapes and land, uniting Celtic and Aleut myths and themes, traveling a line woven so very long ago, the unraveling is all that is left to us. These are poems of sure craft and great love.