Whale Years

For more than three years, poet and artist Gregory O’Brien followed the migratory routes of whales and seabirds across vast tracts of the South Pacific Ocean, resulting in a collection of poems that stand as a homage to a series of remarkable locations and the natural histories of those places. In three parts, this collection stretches across the Pacific, following whale-roads, weather balloons, and sons at sea, charting historical explorations and other Pacific realisms, such as the Pacific trash vortex, the wavering democracy of Tonga, and the political history of Chile. These poems are an exploration of outlying islands, the ocean that lies between them, and the whale-species and sea birds found there. From Waihi looking east and Valparaiso looking west, O’Brien surveys the cultural heart and health of an ocean in memorable, musical, moving lines.

Gregory O’Brien is an award-winning writer, a painter, a literary critic, and an art curator. He is the author of several books, including Beauties of the Octagonal Pool, A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, and Welcome to the South Seas and Back and Beyond.