Notes from an Expedition: Cardiff

So here I am on a blazing June morning, standing before the Captain Scott sculpture by the Norwegian Church on Cardiff Bay. Scott, because this is where he set off on his ill-fated Antarctica expedition from. Can you see the faces of his men carved into the white mosaic? Cardiff because I'm here to meet up with Polar Poet Susan Richardson for a rehearsal of our new show Artic-ulate. The Norwegian church is a nice reminder of my own first trip to Arctic Norway to see the Northern Lights, back in December 2007. But on this particular morning, after a trek back from the bay, we were glad to escape the searing heat by diving into the arctic cool of John Lewis' store!

It was very exciting for Susan and I to get together since so much of our collaboration has been on-line. Inevitably, with me in Leicester and Susan in Cardiff. But with our first Polar Poets' gig coming up at the Wrexham Science Festival next week, there's no substitute for pacing round her sitting-room, practising our set. I'm happy to report that by the end of the day we'd identified all the themes and poems we wanted to cover, tried out some we'll perform together and swapped images to go with the words. It's shaping up. Now to brush up in front of the wardrobe mirror and gather powerpoint, music, props and woolly hats into our luggage. As Scott could tell you, good preparation is everything. And hopefully, the Polar Poets will return in one piece!

I can also report the Welsh cakes Susan served up were delicious and a breezy Water Taxi round the Bay was a wonderful end to our day out. Here's the details for our Wrexham gig:

Siobhan Logan and Susan Richardson, the Polar Poets, will be presenting their show Arctic-ulate as part of the festival's EARTH AND THE UNIVERSE theme. The Polar Poets use poetry, storytelling and multi-media performance to evoke the unique appeal of one of the planet's last great wildernesses. Having experienced this landscape first-hand, they explore the heritage of the Arctic from indigenous peoples and Viking women to European explorers. Their show also highlights the fragility of this landscape at a time of climate change.

Organisers say Wrexham Science Festival 2010 'promises to be more spectacular than ever before. The programme ... is packed with a diverse mix of events ... to encourage the investigation and enjoyment of science and technology.'

Arctic-ulate
Friday 2nd July
7.30pm, Glyndŵr University, Plas Coch Site, Wrexham
This event is free and aimed at adults aged 16+.
For bookings call 01978 293466 or email wsf@glyndwr.ac.uk
www.wrexhamsf.com/en/

Iceland: Sagas, Snow & Steam

So in the middle of our recent heatwave - too much already! - I've been reading the wonderful Laxdaela saga about Gudrun Osviksdottir and reliving the big chill of our Easter trip to Iceland. Here's another extract from my travelblog - prepare to shiver!

Tuesday April 6th

This morning all colours are muffled by the snow drifting across the road. Further east and north, there have been avalanches and schools closed, Bragi says. Outside the bus, black lava pokes through a white landscape. Yellow grasses quiver into the wind. On the heights, mist is smothering the ridges - or it might be snow pouring down gullies. The sky is tearing hanks of grey cloud, a milky light curdling in the gaps beyond.

Bragi reveals that Iceland's tradition of poetry and storytelling is very much alive and thriving with poetry clubs and radio/TV competitions. The tight forms and highly symbolic language of the original sagas are still used, as well as more modern forms. And I'm delighted that our first destination today is Reykholt, the home of Snorri Sturlson, a landmark figure in medieval Icelandic literature. Sturlson penned the famous Prose Edda which recount the doings of the Norse gods as well as Icelandic settlers and several sagas, including one about his ancestor, the warrior-poet, Egil Skallagrimsson. Sturlson was a poet himself and canny politician but when he double-crossed the King of Norway, he was hacked to death in his own cellar at Reykholt. Should have stuck to the pen perhaps ...

Next stop was Hraunfossar, a truly spectacular series of waterfalls that seem to stretch for miles. The wind had dropped at last and the landscape was etched in black rocks, white snow and the piercing blue of the waterfalls and river below. Photographs cannot convey the thundering gush of the water or the creaking of the snow underfoot but you can see we were lucky to catch this place in its wintry colours. It was blistering cold with great ice splinters hanging from the waterfall but we could hardly tear ourselves away.

Back at the Foss Hotel, we were treated to a delicious buffet lunch of home-made soups & breads, salads, coffee and fruit. The sweet tomatoey bread was studded with lumps of salt and the tomato soup was flavoured with chips of aniseed - heavenly. This was typical of the fresh produce we encountered for lunches. We ate till we burst. Bragi was telling us how the local greenhouses were heated by the bubbling hot springs of nearby Deildartunguhver which pumps out water of 97 degrees centigrade and is piped to towns over 60 km away.

The snowy morning at Hraunfossar had been utterly magical. But this was the land of fire as well as ice - and the afternoon was to bring us to the great valley of Thingvellir and the continental rift that runs through Iceland. But that's a whole other story, that place ...

Pilgrim's Progress In Iceland

So the saga of our recent trip to the volcanic isle - between eruptions! - continues:

Day 2 Easter Monday: Snaefellnesnes Peninsula

Were we something like Chaucer's Pilgrims, a gathering of 10 strangers come together for an April journey? Or maybe Tolkien's Fellowship – he was after all inspired by those Norse myths. And certainly we had our own kindly wizard of the roads in Bragi Ragnarsson on a package tour entitled 'Iceland with an Expert'. With a gravelly Icelandic voice and easy manner, he settled into the driving seat of our mini-bus, delivering a stream of patter that took in socio-economic trends of modern Iceland (60% of its population living around the capital city), geological facts, Viking history and ancient legends of the landscape.

In a country where stories flow like lava (the highest no. of published authors per capita), he regaled us with tales of laughing mermen, exploding whales and Viking gangster-poets. At the roadside, he pointed out boulders painted with tiny doors and windows to mark the homes of the Hidden People. And Bragi also broke into a snatch of traditional Icelandic singing, a nasal chanting very like the Saami joiku in sound.

How could we not then be predisposed to the poetry of the place? On a windswept, isolated beach, the tiny Budir church was a black stub against a distant ice-capped mountain range. And these arctic winds were ferocious, battering us to the ground as soon as we emerged. Fingers froze instantly as I tried to fumble with the camera – not even the sand-dunes or craggy brown rocks offered shelter. At Arnarstapi, we stumbled along the cliff walk, amazed by the basalt sea-stacks and black promontories, stark against a deep blue sea. Further along this coast, we tumbled out onto the pebbly beach of Djupalonssandur where white surf tore over black shingle and sand.

Blue, black and brown were the day's colours. Then the vivid orange of rusted metal – remnants of a Grimsby trawler cast by tides across the lava-field, its orange shapes drawing the eye to an even stranger sight – a frozen mass of river that flowed down from the great Snaefellsnes glacier. Here at its edge, where it had frothed into nothing and frozen in an instant, I picked up glassy wafers, striated and fragile. Beyond thick shelves of ice layered one on another and swirls of blue, grey-green and brown stirred into the white.

Even on the bus, we were mesmerised by the sight of water frozen into giant splinters, often blue, spilling down the brown gorges and gullies, a world fastened tight by the spell of ice. As we rolled into Grundarfjordur, thick fat snowflakes bobbed against the windscreen, giving a promise of the morrow's weather. In a room overlooked by the fish-processing factory and white mountains, we were lulled to sleep by howling windsong.

Iceland Before the Ash

So after the pop divas and dodgy bankers, now we know it as the place that shut down half the world's planes. In recent days we've had a powerful reminder of the geological phenomenon that is Iceland. In fact, up till last Wednesday, tour operators were still flying people in for special 'Volcano Holidays' to witness 'the raw power of nature'. This Easter, between eruptions, I got to visit this amazing sub-arctic country and here's the opening of my journey's weblog:

Day One: Easter Sunday Kevlavik

They should have called it Brown-land. A disappointed Viking, stumbling across a giant frozen fjord, named this place Iceland. But coming in from the air, all we could see was a flattened landscape in rusty browns, dusty yellows; so many craters and volcanic cones and even the still-smoking eruption off in the distance. No trees, hardly any houses, and in the centre a brown nothingness to lose yourself in.

Soon we're driving through this volcanic landscape. Some frost-giant has fly-tipped a truck-load of debris – ash and lava and rubble – and it's fallen any old way. Toppling cairns and strange sculptures of black tufa rise up, clumpy rocks smothered in grey lichens and mosses. And at the rim of this flattened wasteland are peaks bare of vegetation, dusty as lunar ridges in colours of iron that got wet.

At the nearby Blue Lagoon, spa, we negotiate communal changing rooms to tumble into the blue-milky waters of this man-made lagoon. Chattering with the season's tourists, it is astoundingly warm and pleasant to sit in the open-air which we know must be icy, surrounded by those rusted-iron hills. Weird and wonderful, exactly as promised. We come out crusted with minerals like the rocks arranged around those milky pools. Not great for the hair but Icelanders reckon it's a tonic for the skin.

And if that was not enough, on our first evening in Iceland, the beautiful Northern Lights Inn lived up to its name. As darkness fell around 10 o'clock, we climbed into the observatory tower and it was like someone had thrown a switch. The aurora borealis snapped into view – ghostly green whirlpools coiling and slithering across the heavens. Up in the Sky-land, a reindeer herder was lassoing the stars, throwing out ropes of colour that brightened and vanished. I thought of all those mythic forms as it morphed from a 'bridge of fire' to a swan snagged in ice to the Merrie Dancers and warriors kicking a spectral football.

For a time then, there seemed to be a lull in the show. But when we donned layers and braved the balcony, we could see a haze of sun-dust smothering the stars in drifts. When it thickened the aurora was not as vivid in colour but far more dynamic in its movement. Suddenly we were seeing great swathes of this dusky light undulating in quick pulses ever-higher. I felt then we really were watching the magnetosphere 'twang and buckle' and the freezing arctic wind seemed to give an echo to the solar winds roaring silently behind this display. Like pebbles caught a great cosmic stream, we watched it funneling light in from space, the veil of the earth's ionosphere folding and rippling before our eyes.

At midnight when we retreated shuddering with cold, the aurora was still playing itself out. We'd only been in Iceland for half-a-day. Could the next three days possibly live up to what we'd already experienced in this other-worldly place?

Polar Poets at Wrexham

Get this - the first ever Polar Poets gig is now booked!

We will appear at the Wrexham Science Festival in North Wales at 7.30pm on Friday 2nd July. If you're in that part of the world, do come and see us!

The Wrexham Festival is designed to make science accessible and exciting to all ages. Organisers want it to be “the highlight of the early summer calendar ... to have a fresh feel and encourage us all to investigate, enjoy, learn and re-think our ideas about science and technology."





Our Polar Poet event will address the Earth & the Universe theme and here's a flavour of what we'll offer:

Arctic-ulate is a multi-media show that interweaves poetry, storytelling, performance, monologue, music and Powerpoint images. It evokes the unique appeal of the Arctic, one of the planet’s last great wildernesses, and explores the science and heritage of this landscape, from ice-melt and the aurora borealis to indigenous peoples and European explorers.

Devised and performed by the Polar Poets, Siobhan Logan and Susan Richardson, it also highlights the fragility of the Arctic at a time of climate change and increasing industrialisation. We aim to entertain, to cast word spells, but also to encourage people to reflect on some of the most pressing environmental issues of our time.

So now we get to do the fun bit - organise a meet-up and start doing some rehearsing. Think polar skies and penguins, Saami music and saris, solar dust and Scott's Antarctic trek ... So many stories and images and sciencey bits - and now we get to play two voices off each other. I can't wait to start working on this new show, Arctic-ulate.

Watch this space to see how it's shaping up ...

Sub-arctic Day-dreams

Laid up with a hacking cough and cold, I am taking comfort today in my ICELAND brochure. Because we've just booked 5 days at Easter and I am so excited! We'll land in Reykjavik on Easter Sunday and then get to trek round the lava fields, hot springs and glacial landscapes of the South West - with an 'Iceland expert' in tow.

I got to meet a rep. from the 'Discover the World' company at my recent Northern Lights event and grabbed a copy of her brochure. So right now, I'm marvelling at their stunning photographs of exploding geysers, beaches tumbled with icebergs, cliff stacks pounded by sub-arctic seas. Ever since visiting arctic Norway, (see above) I've been longing to venture to another polar setting and Iceland, even below the arctic circle, is an enticing prospect. It's an otherworldly place and I'm hoping to catch the tail end of their winter.

So expect to hear more of my plans for this expedition over coming weeks. I also plan to post up a weblog while I'm out there - starting 5th April. Time to dig out those wonderful Viking sagas and do some fresh research on the landscapes, geology & culture of Iceland. Maybe even learn how to pronounce some of those fabulous nordic place names - Snaefellsnes - Grundarfjordur - Thingvellir.

I'm following in Susan's footsteps of course - having been inspired by her beautiful 'Gudrid' poems. And we are firming up plans right now that I hope will lead to a posting of our first ever Polar Poets gig. But for now, I'm just conjuring images of 'the land of Fire and Ice' as I sip on the honey and ginger hot lemon toddies.

A Rimed Thing

'hear yourself rustling in the silence,
smell frost-needles fastening hair ...'

'Firebridge to Skyshore'

All morning the mist curled around its threads until finally, my hair froze, just like my poem. I was become another rimed thing in the landscape. Only we weren't in the Arctic but in the hills of Hathersage, Derbyshire. At 8.30 am, the sun was a shrunken disc above Carl Wark. Barely luminous at all. The intricate textures of this world lay revealed in crystals and dendrites.

Feathery rings of wood grain on a post; a lattice of splinters in a bootprint; frost blossoms bursting on the heather. Up on the heights, rocks crouched like giants petrified in the mist. Spectral sounds drifted through of a crow kaarking, a sheep bleating, my stick clink-clinking a frozen puddle. The moorland's thorny trees were black fractals in the gloom. Under an overhang, icicles exploded along grass stems and erupted into bubble-wrap on a boulder.

Susan and I are both writers who draw creative sustenance from this season. I've written nothing new this past month, beyond blogs and reviews, but I have been squirreling away nuggets of thought, creamy tubers of winter sweetness. We're busy firing off applications for Polar Poet gigs, mainly at summer festivals, and when we're telling tales of the Arctic, this time will be our hoard of inspiration.