In the winter of 2005/06 novelist and short story writer Jean McNeil lived in the Antarctic for over three months as writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey. She journeyed to the Antarctic and back on research vessels, flew around the continent in planes, visited remote field camps and lived on a scientific base. Her project was to write a literary novel, published as The Ice Lovers (2009). A subsequent residency in the Arctic, as writer-in-residence with a Natural Environment Research Council expedition to west Greenland in 2009, forms the basis of this polar notebook in poetic form, encompassing journal entries, poetry, images and maps. Vivid, immediate, ambitious, these poem-sequences are 'verbal photographs of essentially mysterious places', where the 'polar night teaches that to know light you must also know darkness'. In Night Orders the novelist's eye for telling detail marries with a keen ear for patterns of sound. McNeil's often daring imagery and willingness to trust the music of poetry is perfectly suited to her task of mapping in languages these extraordinary worlds.