Search results for "Whaling"

Of whales and men: Caitríona O’Reilly’s septentrional voyage in “The Sea Cabinet” (2006)

2021

International audience; The title-poem of Caitríona O’Reilly’s second collection – The Sea Cabinet – is a sequence of five ekphrastic pieces paying tribute to the city of Hull’s past as a major whaling port. As she perambulates through the galleries of the Maritime Museum, the Irish poetess is inspired by all the paraphernalia on display: skeletons of various species of whales, whaler’s tools but also journals, logbooks, paintings, illustrations and hundreds of examples of the folk art and mythemes of the whaler. From one poem to the next, O’Reilly depicts the northernness of the Arctic Ocean as eery but bewitching otherness, focusing on illustrations of Captain Graville’s whaling ship ice-…