Cover Photo: Gentoo Penguin in Surf by Jacqueline Burke

Finding Meteorites in Antarctica

by Paul Brooke

Available on this page January 2027

Finding Meteorites in Antarctica

This poetry collection studies intimately the landscape, wildlife, and lost history of the Antarctic. With a naturalist’s eye, Brooke creates vignettes through an invented form (a zeitgeber) that drives the poems with rhythm, metaphor, and layered meaning. Finding Meteorites in Antarctica resonates and crackles with language meant for those who care about saving this ecosystem and celebrating this unique place.

Advance praise for Finding Meteorites in Antarctica

There is a reason Antarctica inspires art. The stark and barren landscape, all white and greys and blues and seemingly unchanging, triggers the part of us so desperate to fill in every blank space and create order with meaning.  Antarctica's landscape provides just enough to become more tempting than a simple blank canvas;  it is textures and colors and curves encouraging us to look for patterns, systems and symmetries.  

Dr. Paul Brooke's poems embrace that human need for form and description,  establishing his own novel framework to hold together and organize an understanding of this most inhuman continent.  He admirably creates feeling and place, fully controlling any expository overburden.  I like that, and I think you'll like it too.

—Professor Ralph Harvey, Dept. of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences,  Case Western Reserve University

About the Author

Paul Brooke has five full-length collections of poetry including Light and Matter: Poems and Photographs of Iowa (2008) and Meditations on Egrets: Poems and Photographs of Sanibel Island (2010), Sirens and Seriemas: Photographs and Poems of the Amazon and Pantanal (2015), Arm Wrestling at the Iowa State Fair (2018) and The Skald and the Drukkin Tröllaukin: Photographs and Poems of Iceland (forthcoming 2022).

 He was trained as an undergraduate as an ornithologist and later completed his Bachelors and Masters at Iowa State University and his Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Brooke is a Professor of English at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, where he teaches Advanced Creative Writing, Introduction to Creative Writing, Creative Photography, Major Authors, and Literary Theory. He is the current Poet Laureate of Iowa.