Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names

In this artfully crafted collection, Soraya Mariam Peerbaye leaps onto the stage with aplomb. She examines how naming expresses our relationship with each other and the natural world and how meaning is affected when there is no permanent human settlement to remember names.

Binding her book into three segments, she explores in exquisite detail the concrete and the ephemeral — objects of play, profession, and hobbies. Here is a poetic treatise on the semantics of naming and gesture; how they can express possession and power over another, or kinship, inquisitiveness, openness, mercy, and love. This astonishing sequence of poems moves from the tip of South America to the Antarctic and back, with a lightness of being in the floating world of incisive language.

AUTHOR

Soraya Peerbaye

Soraya Peerbaye‘s first collection of poetry, Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (Goose Lane, 2008), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Tell: poems for a girlhood (Pedlar Press, 2015) was nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the recipient of the Trillium Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, and is an advocate for equity in the arts. She lives in Toronto with her daughter.

Reviews

In this artfully crafted first collection, Soraya Peerbaye explores in exquisite detail the material and the ephemeral, from the intricacies of objects owned by her father, and the habits that animate them, to the landscape and residents of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Throughout, Peerbaye weaves a poetic treatise on the meaning of naming and gesture, and how they can express possession and power, or kinship, inquisitiveness and love. These astonishing poems illuminate a lightness of being in a floating world of incisive, articulate language.

“A sense of place and story dominates this first collection. Soraya Peerbaye… has an ear for languages and how it shapes experience… Peerbaye as a companion-poet is quietly deft, her voice ranging from lyrical to musical plain-speaking.”
– Arc Poetry Magazine

“These are marvellous poems, deft, rich, searching, and with remarkable range: tender in recalling her father’s French and Creole roots, spare and brilliant in depicting the landscape of Antarctica. For Peerbaye words connect lives across time and space. Reading her poems sharpens our own connection with the world.”
“If the poet has a duty to see and name, Soraya Peerbaye has answered the call. I believe in this, the object, quotidian, beloved, she writes, fully aware of how names change as we encounter them, lose and regain and even rename them, in turn renaming us. Unapologetically gentle and intimate, this ambitious first book is not a mere coming-of-age, but a coming into one’s own, introducing us to an explorer aware of the joys and dangers of intrusion.”