The Owner of the Sea: Three Inuit Stories Retold

by Richard Price

A The Scotsman Book of the Year 2021.

In re-telling the Inuit stories included here, Richard Price opens out remarkable northern vistas and unfamiliar narratives, strange gods and unforgettable characters. Carol Rumens described Price as a poet who is 'brilliant quietly: inventive, sometimes dazzling, but never merely showy': precisely the talents for rendering, rather than appropriating these great story-cycles of Inuit culture.

Here we learn of 'Sedna the Sea Goddess' and 'Kiviuq the Hunter', the central protagonists of the book's remarkable stories. They are rich in extraordinary incident. In Sedna's world women can marry dogs and have half-puppy, half-human children; birds beat their wings so hard they call down a storm on a fugitive kayak; walruses originate from... well that would be telling. Each story-cycle abounds in natural wonder, celebrating our creaturely relations with our fellow inhabitants of land and sea. 'The Old Woman Who Changed Herself into a Man', a short narrative, bridges the major sequences, telling the story of an older woman and a younger one who become lovers in the isolation of their remote home.

Genres: Poetry

188 pages, Paperback

Published August 26, 2021

About the author

Richard Price is a contemporary Scottish poet and novelist who has also published translations. He grew up in Renfrewshire, and began writing poetry at the age of 14. After leaving school, he trained as a journalist at Napier College Edinburgh, before taking a degree in English and Librarianship at the University of Strathclyde.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Sarah Gregory]

I very much enjoyed Richard Price's retelling of Inuit stories which are part of an oral tradition. Sometimes these poems remind me of " The Odyssey" ;some times of medieval poetry such as " Gawain and the Green Knight" and " The Owl and the Nightingale" ; sometimes of Yeats and the Irish traditions . The themes are similar: relationships dealing with transformation; understanding gained through travel; the significance of the natural world, the nature of love. Richard Price uses words carefully and I shall look out for his other books.