Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poems (paper)

Unlike most books of poems nowadays, Goodbye, Ice by Lawrence Millman has a strong ecological bias. The book offers a window on the natural world of the Arctic and its tradition-bound indigenous people. Climate change, inevitably, raises its ugly head in many of the poems, but the book itself is a lament not just for the loss of ice, but for the loss of the Arctic itself.

Lawrence Millman is a true original who takes no prisoners. His poetry does not ask permission of the kind of people who think they know what ‘poetry’ is, and as a result it is truer to life—real life—than most of what marches under that banner. These poems come from, and speak for, the reality of Earth as it is.
— Paul Kingsnorth, author of Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist

From polar bears to pointless missionaries, plagues of cruise ships to mosquitoes, eiders to owls to ravens and the people to whom all of these matter, Goodbye, Ice shows as many strands and colors of the polar zones as any Aurora Borealis. You’ll rue the warming, yes, but you’ll not close the book without laughing too. I love these poems very much.
—Robert Michael Pyle, author of Wintergreen, Chinook & Chanterelle and Nature Matrix

I imagine future archaeologists finding wind-chiseled stones in an Inuit graveyard. On each stone is carved a poem from Lawrence Millman’s Goodbye, Ice, a book that’s equally an epitaph and a celebration for the arctic spirit-world and landscape. Said archeologists would say, “So this is what happened here…” — and be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.

— Howard Norman, author of The Ghost Clause

What Jacques Cousteau did for the oceans, Millman does for the Arctic, with the same sense of wonder and urgency. Finding beauty and humor in all he sees, he is a prophet in the wilderness. His gentle poems remind us a vengeful wrath awaits us if we don’t repent. Never has a prophecy been so palatable. Let his flying shaman, his Inuit, raven, lemming, and bear take you on an exhilarating journey.

— David O. Born, author of Eskimo Education and the Trauma of Social Change