Tom Lowenstein 1941-2025

Tom Lowenstein, the poet and ethnographer, died on 21 March. His fieldwork in an Iñupiaq village in north-west Alaska began in the 1970s and resulted in seven books or more. Some were orthodox monographs; others, including Ancient Land, Sacred Whale and The Structure of Days Out used a combination of verse and prose (as well as personal observation) to take the measure of a complex society dealing with the onrush of modernity. His last piece for the LRB was a verse ‘conversation’ with Murasaki Shikibu, the 11th-century author of The Tale of Genji:

You would be astonished
at the squalor of European history.
But you would have liked Jane Austen.