Word: north
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...charge of stars, flowers/ & the blaze of autumn color," he writes in "Crimson Leaves," also from Abiding Places. The poem describes the annual turning of maples across the entirety of the Korean peninsula, from the Tumen River bordering China to Naejang Mountain in Ko's native North Jeolla province and on to Cheju Island. By early December, when I arrive at Naejang Mountain to trace Ko's footsteps up Seoraebong Peak, the famed red foliage - for Ko an arboreal emblem of a unified land and people - has all flamed out. The ground is a pulp of mud and fallen leaves...
...sickly teenager stumbled across a volume of work by the poet Han Ha Wun lying in a roadside ditch. He devoured it, decided that "to be a poet was freedom itself" and went on to become his nation's preeminent living bard, a singer of democracy and reunification with North Korea. Whether or not you believe his tales of reincarnation, what is certain is that Ko is a master chronicler of the Korean landscape. He explores his country like no other, and his collected poems beat any Lonely Planet guide in their survey of the land...
...banquet during the first Reunification Summit in Pyongyang in June 2000, during which Ko recited "At the Taedong River," an occasional poem that reportedly much moved the fearless Dear Leader. An earlier piece, written after a ramble around the Hermit Kingdom the year before, heralded the future of the North Korean capital as a lepidopterist's playground that would be the envy of Nabokov: "Fifty years from now," Ko wrote in his 1999 collection Abiding Places, "May this be a city where window-glass butterflies/ Swallowtails, orange tips, duskywings, skippers, blues/ Mourning cloaks, awlets, dryads, ahlbergia & red admirals fill...
...international organizations like UNESCO have started committing significant funds to tribal research and education projects. This is happening in tandem with recent grass-roots efforts to defend native tongues. "There are signs of a growing global movement to revitalize these languages - and in unlikely places, from inner cities in North America to the Australian Outback," says Harrison...
...Other groups indigenous to the Andaman Islands have fared comparatively better by living in total seclusion. The mysterious Sentinelese - named after North Sentinel Island, their ominous-sounding home - are protected by an Indian government policy barring most outsiders from making contact with them. The few anthropologists who have seen the Sentinelese have gleaned little about their language or culture before being chased away by a hail of arrows...