As a child, Nancy Campbell had a snow globe; in it was a diorama of a pine forest, a cottage and a figurine of an old lady picking up sticks. Campbell would shake it and watch spellbound as the plastic flakes fell through the viscous liquid. “My father was often away during those years,” she writes. “Once, having returned from a particularly long trip, he told me a bedtime story in countless instalments about how my toys were lost and trying to find their way back home.” As the tale evolved, the toys became lost in a winter forest; it seemed to her that her snow globe would offer the ideal refuge. The Library of Ice explores cultural perspectives on ice and snow, and traces Campbell’s ice-obsession to that memory of adventure, return and comfort.
Campbell is an artist, printmaker and a poet of distinction – her collection Disko Bay was shortlisted for a Forward prize (“The coast is new as a foetus and old as a fossil. / The bedrock rebounds from the glacier’s weight”). In 2010, she gave up her job with a London dealer in manuscripts, and for the next seven years stayed in a series of artists’ residencies concerned with Arctic climate and culture. Three were in Greenland, one in Iceland, and one in Switzerland – her stays in Greenland produced the poems of Disko Bay, and also her printmaker’s book How To Say I Love You In Greenlandic. She’s influenced by Barry Lopez’s magnificent Arctic Dreams, and explicitly moves between two traditions of nature writing: the “silver-tongued scientific interpretation” of John Muir, and another she frames as “silent with awe”. Most chapters focus on two places: the Bodleian Library in Oxford is paired with Antarctica, Fife with Washington DC, Switzerland with Italy.
Ice is understood as a preserver of human history, offering glimpses of different ways of being
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