Oceanic is a generous, romantic, and ambitious look at the different stages of life, and how we experience the love and wonder that lead us to become more fully realized and compassionate as we grow each decade… [it’s] Nezhukumatathil’s most cohesive collection to date, as she takes her prior preoccupations and dissects them in new ways that invite, as all of her work does, a sense of marvel and astonishment.

Cristanne Miller’s insightful Reading in Time (2012) emphasizes Dickinson’s treatment of the “turban’d seas” as an example of the cross-cultural dimensions in her poetry, an insight I seek to complement with a sense of how the sea also provides us with a Dickinson who decenters human subjectivity through her use of images of the tides, drowning, and the immensity of the sea. Jetn̄il-Kijiner was the Marshall Islands’ climate envoy at Cop27, and criticised the failure to phase out fossil fuels even as developing nations celebrated the loss and damage fund. For her, the natural forces human beings have long regarded as dangerous—tigers, snakes, lava—can be sources not just of power but also of safety. As Hester Blum has trenchantly argued, “the sea is not a metaphor” (670)—it cannot be contained by linguistic framing—and we can read Dickinson on the sea most usefully when we acknowledge that the sea’s materiality pushes against the boundaries of her language, even as her language pushes back. We invite visitors to explore the DEA in its original form, where they can discover nearly 18 years worth of digital Dickinson archival and scholarly work.

In so doing, she demonstrated both the sea’s remarkable fecundity as a source of metaphor and its capacity to undo the very analogies it enabled. Here love and mortality come together in the image of drowning, with the conclusion suggesting that love persists in the moment of death, even as the sea illustrates the inevitability of mortality and loss. The ocean is home to billions of species that collaborate in ways we can never completely comprehend.

On one hand, a major thread of Pacific poetry documents, critiques, and laments the legacy and ongoing impacts of colonialism. As we have seen, Dickinson’s use of the sea intensifies in her later poems, and builds on a recognition of the sea’s materiality that she was already exploring in the 1860s, as she finds the connections with mortality and the ways in which the sea provides a rebuke to human egotism to be particularly compelling.The “inland soul” resembles the greenhorn sailor so common in both fictional and non-fictional accounts of first voyages at sea (Herman Melville’s Redburn, and, to a lesser degree, Typee partake of this tradition), and it moves steadily from the experiences that orient it to the world to the disorienting “divine intoxication / Of the first league out from Land”.

Nezhukumatathil is poetry editor of Orion and her writing has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, and Tin House.Men who have never known hardship would be unlikely to believe the seafarer’s description of the difficulties of life at sea. We’ve gathered these ocean poems from a range of sources to help you open your head and soul to the wide unknown. W. Franklin’s variorum numbering of her poems, and it illustrates the way in which Dickinson can extend the treatment of the sea in popular forms.

In these poems, Dickinson does not so much discern anthropocentric lessons from nature but rather creates new forms that account for a non-anthropocentric universe. reminds readers that not every craft is brought safely to port by its pilot’s ministrations: “’Twas such a greedy, greedy wave / That licked it from the Coast – / Nor ever guessed the stately sails / My little craft was lost!Pacific literature courses are now taught in high schools and colleges throughout Oceania, and there are publishers and literary journals dedicated wholly to Pacific writing. Globe globe globe globe,” pulses the jellyfish in Les Murray’s poem, Jellyfish, intimating both its soft-bodied shape and the prospect of a future ocean dominated by anoxic life. It helps to regulate our climate, it’s home to over 200,000 known species, and it is responsible for producing over half of the world’s oxygen.