bridget's review

Sam Wilson Fletcher: But this time the spout shot up red, Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers, 2026

Review by Bridget Penney in New Cambridge Chapbook Review, Issue 4, Spring 2026

But this time the spout shot up red is structured around the time Sam WF spent on a ship travelling from Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego to Whalersʼ Bay, Deception Island and the Antarctic Peninsula. Its A4 pages are laid out with prose, poetry, graphics and photos plus boxes of text which have something of the appearance of film intertitles. These elements are in dialogue with one another and even when not signalled by a shift of form, the text is always on the move. The book turns out to be not so much about the trip itself; rather what has motivated people to travel to Antarctica over the years. It also makes clear that, however appealingly remote Antarctica may appear from most peopleʼs everyday lives, we all exist within a planet-wide web of connections that are constantly transmitting and exchanging. For instance: a friend who helps fund WFʼs trip had dreamed of visiting the ice himself in his youth: now he works as a civil engineer redesigning roads ʻGermanyʼs black riversʼ in the Ruhr. Coal mined from the Ruhr once powered the whaling steamships to the Antarctic. The water flowing in Leidenʼs canals ultimately touches the ice.

ʻ[H]aving won a spot on an expedition for ʻclimate ambassadorsʼ - basically a tourist cruise dressed up as something rather more vitalʼ, hearing the expeditionʼs climate specialist ʻpreaching the necessity of a continuation in the large scale extraction and use of fossil fuelsʼ must have engendered considerable unease. At the start of the book, WF writes of an early fascination with whales, wanting ʻto chase in the bow-wave of a speeding leviathanʼ, evoking the image motherlode of Moby Dick. ʻIt is no coincidence that our route down the lefthand side of Graham Land followed that of the whaling ships of the past, for a safe harbour in which to park the corpses of whales for stable ʻconversionʼ is also a safe harbour in which to serve paying guests three-course meals as the light spills from the picture windows onto the blocks of ice outside...ʼ The staff ensuring the smooth running of the ship have less violent jobs than the crews of the Antarctic whalers that by early twentieth century accounted for half the whales killed and harvested for their oil worldwide. But, like their predecessors, most are not the real beneficiaries of the lucrative trade they are involved in: notes made from the shipʼs manifest, showing the crew membersʼ jobs, nationalities, and positions on a sharply sliding pay scale, make clear how in the economy of luxury tourism multiple inequalities persist. WFʼs comment on the dearth of images for early C20th whaling is silently answered when the ship raises anchor to leave Deception Bay and its tines are thickly cluttered with whale bones. Evidence of a near mass-extinction event, these bones have formed something like a geological layer on the sea floor, marking Antarctica in a manner similar to the remains of tree trunks and giant penguins.

This image is important because it seems that travelling to Antarctica is not so much a voyage into the unknown, but a trip into what you think you know from watching TV and reading, and, perhaps even more importantly, what that may have led you to dream and imagine. Frozen Planet and the polar episodes of Jacques Cousteau are the ʻTV wildlife eyeʼ here: WF mentions the death of a member of Cousteauʼs crew after falling on the ice, reinforcing the spectre of sudden death that is present even for those travelling in relative luxury. WF writes of HP Lovecraftʼs compelling novel of the imagined Antarctic At the Mountains of Madness that it twists the form of the scientific report to make it frightening. He doesnʼt mention, but I think itʼs relevant as a further link in the chain of images, that Lovecraft also draws heavily on a much earlier novel, Edgar Allan Poeʼs Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which had silently incorporated verbatim chunks of contemporary explorersʼ accounts and newspaper reports. The city of mysterious cubes imagined by Lovecraft finds an echo in the city WF thinks of when he ventures onto the ice. When WF writes about the icing over of Antarcticaʼs forests, I am reminded of J.G. Ballardʼs fictional evocations of catastrophically altered environments. WFʼs poem ʻTonyʼs Lamentʼ gloriously embodies these processes of accretion and suggestion by channelling Tony Iommi, founding member of Black Sabbath and apparently a massive fan of Frozen Planet. Hazing through a fever dream of ice, mummified seals and resurrected? Ozzy, the crashing of calving glaciers aligning with heavy metal music segues sweetly into mention of a 2013 gig played by Metallica at an airbase in Argentine Antarctica where the audience listened to the band unamplifed, through headphones, because of concerns about noise pollution...

Yet WF writes that whatever you have researched and imagined, nothing prepares for what the experience of being on the ice is actually like. Itʼs presumably in an attempt to get to the heart of this that he collects - or captures - a fragment of ice and takes it back to his cabin where he plonks it in a champagne bucket. The compelling narrative of the iceʼs ʻdyingʼ follows, with WF filling a triple role as scientist, destroyer, and poet; carefully filling sample bottles to document the dissolution he has initiated, moving it into the shower when meltwater overflows the bucket, commenting on the smell as it slowly collapses, imagining a beating heart. Whether drinking some of the meltwater - and thus exchanging with the iceʼs potential pathogens - is in the interests of research, an attempt at atonement or a bid for dodgy heroics I am not sure, but itʼs a powerful image of the interconnected ways in which humans exploit, destroy, study and venerate the world we live in.