Brenda Wineapple
‘The Voice of Unfiltered Spirit’

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad” and who often believed the Holy Spirit was speaking through him, the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.

Ben Lerner
The Pain Artist

The artist Ed Atkins’s video Pianowork 2 poses questions about the representation of reality.

Peter Brown
Charged Wonders

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Musuem of Art aims to give voice and density to the Christian cultures in Africa with which Byzantium interacted over the many centuries of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Joan Silber
Playing It Safe

Alice McDermott’s new novel, about American civilians in Vietnam during the war, asks whether the intricacy of moral complications precludes heroism.

On the NYR Online

Laura Quinton
The Universalist

For three decades, the dancer and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon has aspired to make ballet a popular art.

Martin Filler
Sublime Detritus

In her witty, poignant assemblages, the late artist Alexis Smith studied the atavistic comforts and persistent myths of home.

Free from the Archives

Two hundred fifty-one years and eight days ago, on January 17, 1773, an expedition led by Captain James Cook crossed the Antarctic Circle and came within seventy-five miles of the Antarctica coast before being turned back by a field of ice. On January 27, 1820, a Russian explorer named Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen got close enough to see an ice shelf, while three days later Edward Bransfield, an Irish sailor impressed into the British Navy, caught sight of the Antarctic Peninsula. And on January 25, 1840—184 years ago today—an American expedition led by Captain Charles Wilkes charted 1,500 miles of the coastline, claiming to have finally discovered the continent. (As it happens, the first documented landfall was made by a Swedish ship on January 24, 1895; Ernest Shackleton arrived on January 8, 1902; and Captain Scott’s doomed expedition reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912.)

In the Review’s August 9, 2001, issue, Al Alvarez read eight books about polar explorations north and south, and wrote about the romance of the sublime glaciers (“These tabular bergs are like masses of beautiful alabaster,” wrote Wilkes) and the horror of the barren wastes (an “inexpressibly horrid…country doomed by Nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays,” concluded Cook).

Al Alvarez
Ice Capades

“The Ancient Mariner’s fateful albatross appears out of the polar fog. Dr. Frankenstein is rescued while sledding across the ice in pursuit of his monster and tells his improbable story to the captain of ship northbound out of Archangel toward the pole. As far as the Romantics were concerned, the polar wastes were as far as they could get from the bewigged and powdered polite society of the Augustan Age, and sublime enough to justify their wildest imaginings.”

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