Chris Vola reviews
The Skald and the Drukkin Tröllaukin
by Paul Brooke

A masterfully visceral piece of hybrid art, Paul Brooke’s The Skald and the Drukkin Tröllaukin is a lyrically and visually dazzling collection of Norse-inspired poems and photographs that probe the unique beauty and terror of the Icelandic landscape in its starkest and most delightful moments.

With an always keen ear for nature’s music, Brooke’s cool and shrewdly composed verses (which often employ ancient poetic forms like the ljóðaháttar, whose alliterative magic perfectly encapsulates the “burned and scalded soul” of an island where “glaciers calved countries”) veer from impressive depictions of volcanic turbulence and the onslaught of impassable waterfalls to the foibles of the strange and complex creatures, human and otherwise, who call this seemingly inhospitable rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean home. Like the roguish and iconic puffin, a bird that is simultaneously “A clever mime./An opera singer./A scuba diver./A faithful lover.” The gorgeous, textured image of one of these little fellows that Brooke has juxtaposed with his terse lines suggests that each description is more than plausible.

Amidst the poetic grandeur and stunning portrayals of craters, foreboding basalt columns, and Viking ruins, there are also quieter, deeply personal moments exploring childhood trauma, guilt, divorce, and lovesickness, all of which are beautifully sharpened by the frigid and fiery milieu:

Who knew I would find

a woman, hot with lava and plumes of steam
who shifted my plate tectonics. Who knew

I would find a love, multilayered and replete
with fossils, a waterfall melted by our heat.

Brooke is a skàld (“poet”) and photographer worthy of any country. But here in his chosen Iceland, he has conjured a mystical, immersive, painful, and profound ode that is as deeply moving and as timeless as the best sagas.

Paul Brooke is a Professor of English at Grand View University. His work has won numerous awards including The Iowa Prize for Poetry. Full-length collections include Light and Matter: Photographs and Poems of Iowa, Meditations on Egrets: Photographs and Poems of Sanibel Island, Sirens and Seriemas: Photographs and Poems of the Amazon and Brazil, and Arm Wrestling at the Iowa State Fair.

Chris Vola is the author of seven books and two chapbooks of poems, most recently Impractical Taxidermy (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He lives and bartends in New York and can be found at chrisvola.net.