In Sailing To the Edges, readers are invited to join Norwegian polar explorer and hero Roald Amundsen in an imagined poetic diary of his 1897 quest to reach the South Pole. Experience with him and Belgian and Norwegian shipmates: discoveries and hazards, being iced-in for nearly two years, facing madness and death, and suffering shrinking rations in intense cold during the total dark of the polar winter and the blinding light of an equally frigid summer. A far more comfortable contemporary voyage in Arctic seas off Iceland, Svalbard, and Norway, gives rise to a group of lyric poems, as author Jennifer M Phillips bears witness to warming ocean and air, threatened wildlife, and endangered human relationships.