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Critical Praise for Carta Marina: A Poem in Three Parts

• Passionately and precisely, sensuously and learnedly, Ann Fisher-Wirth's Carta Marina maps the terrain of our earthly fidelities and losses, calling them forth in all their varying shapes and flavors, by name. These poems summon abundance, recording in their pages a fully inhabited, fully inhabitable world.

  — Jane Hirshfield, author of After and Given Sugar, Given Salt

• Carta Marina is rare among books of poetry: at once a lyric triptych of searing beauty and an absorbing novella that turns upon a disclosed secret from a woman's life. The poet becomes a cartographer of the heart as she moves through a year's sojourn in Sweden, lighting candles in her own darkness. Inspired by the country's earliest map, she charts the territories of aging, the surprise of rekindled love and a belated mourning of unimaginable loss. There are, along the way, startlingly vivid meditations on the ancient and contemporary worlds of the far north, a tender portrait of marriage, anti-war protests and even a trip to Paris. Fisher-Wirth shifts wildly but deftly between registers and languages, moving through eons of time while holding still in the present, allowing the reindeer herds to come silently toward us on the page. I thank her for this book.

  — Carolyn Forché, author of Blue Hour

Reviews

• Country Dog ReviewSummer 2009

  http://www.countrydogreview.org/Book_Reviews.html

  Reviewed by Emma Bolden

  With its ability to name and organize the events of our lives, to situate people, places, and events in relation to each other, and to show their respective size and influence, a poem is, in many ways, a map, and the poet a cartographer. Through the searingly beautiful triptych of poems which make up Carta Marina, the reader follows Ann Fisher-Wirth as she plays the part of cartographer, attempting to label, organize, and therefore make sense of those parts of her experience which seem most nonsensical, most impossible to understand, and most impossible to reconcile with and relate to each other. During a ten-month stay in Sweden, the speaker attempts to make sense of her existence in the "rainy hours" of an unfamiliar and iced-over country where she is confronted not only by her own physical frailty--her chest hurting so much that she can express the pain only in fractured language ("... Want to sleep want a painkiller strong enough to take the pain / away so I can remember the suppleness of breathing") --but the frailty of human life in general. Upon hearing piano music, a revelation strikes her: "that Chuck and Jonathan, my students, being newly dead / would never hear it, never sit in the Aula / gazing up at its leafy panels and painted dome of stars." Confronted with the tenuous nature of human existence, the speaker realizes that any attempt to make sense of life will be difficult: There's no getting out of this easily.

  Having already embarked on a journey through these darkened territories, the speaker's experience of the world is further fractured when a past love appears in her present. Fisher-Wirth's poems portray, with unflinching honesty and heart-wrenching accuracy, the process of mapping one of modern life's most treacherous territories: the intersection between the present and the past allowed by modern technology. She struggles to find a name for the experience, presenting it first in terms of evidence for the reader to interpret themselves. In "Fragment: Email from Paris," the man we will later know as a former lover admits both to not forgetting about the speaker--"Unbeknownst, however, you have had no trouble / passing through my memory (remorse)"--and wanting to see her again: "If you were not living in Europe / I would probably not have written you now . . . // You, my first 'real' girlfriend." Fisher-Wirth begins a correspondence with him, struggling

  [t]o honor the present
  and honor the past, be in the present
  and not shut off the past [...]
  so that loss // is not the whole story.
  

  The poems follow the painful process of transforming the terrain of her life by allowing a past love to develop and grow in the present. The speaker is forced to "re-map" her life in the present and in the past, both as the woman with three grown daughters and a husband who "sleeps beside [her], / beloved, actual," and as the eighteen-year-old girl who fell in love with

  a boy
  who loves chess
  and hates psychology, whose hands
  are knob-knuckled
  and eager and whose mouth
  always tastes of Chesterfields,
  

  now "a doctor in Paris" who writes her, after thirty-seven years, to revisit and resolve their time "[p]laying house in 1965."

  As Fisher-Wirth maps and re-maps the landscape of her life, she turns for inspiration to Olaus Magnus' 1539 map, the Carta Marina. The map presents both an eerily accurate depiction of the geography of Sweden and additional illustrations which maintain a mixture of fact and fantasy. These include depictions of the natural world and its proper order:

  Two swans sail in synchrony
  above two eels or fish towards rocks where
  a fiddler plays a tune
  

  and a ferret or ermine runs home
  to his mate peeking out from a shawl-shaped tunnel
  

  Magnus also includes unnatural interruptions, monsters and other creatures which disturb the natural order but nonetheless co-exist with the ordinary animals on the map. Like her former lover's e-mail, these creatures appear out of the depths to rear their heads and render the natural order unnatural: "Two very large sea monsters / The one truculent with its teeth / The other horrible with its horn," the "erect whale" who "sinks a big ship / With a look of dogged satisfaction..." and "Demons" who "serve themselves on the flesh of captured men."

  Fisher-Wirth turns to the map and to these illustrations for explanation and guidance. In "The women of the Carta Marina," for instance, she examines Magnus' drawings of women involved in the work of life and death. Magnus presents women as playing one of two parts: the murderess who ends lives and the mother who creates and nurtures new life. There is the woman "Poised to shoot her arrow" beside a lover, two women who "are present / for the pouring out of blood," and women involved in the beginning of life, as the "round-cheeked, / sturdy" woman who stands beside "a three-antlered reindeer," gazing towards the viewer as "Milk gushes / into a wooden pail / from both udders." However, as it involves both life and death, and bringing new life to a love which was once dead, Fisher-Wirth's situation can't be solved by retreating to these expected roles. She realizes that "the map's a girl;" cartography, then, becomes itself a mode of creation, and the world of the poems opens as Fisher-Wirth begins to follow not the product but the process of mapping through the telling and re-telling of her story, which, in essence, re-creates it. In this way, and only this way, she can come to terms with their story.

  Like Magnus, whose tendency toward continual revision and re-evaluation led to twelve years of work on the Carta Marina, Fisher-Wirth names, re-evaluates, and revises her experience. She first maps their story as that of "a girl in whose belly a child quickens, / who rises naked, calm / from her boyfriend's bed" only to see a "smear of blood on the toilet paper," then "the forceps, / the stillbirth, the hospital bed." This, however, is the story she tells herself, and not the truth. She revises the story to instead reveal the truth she can finally name, now that the past and the present have so painfully joined together. She now knows her lover's side of the story, and can revise her own in light of his. She re-maps their story as that of "the boy she turned to," not the child's father, who "covered her body / with the sweetness of warm rain" until "the waters closed over [them] both." In mapping, she is able to revisit the moment when "She has not started down the road yet towards the blood, the gray coffin. He has not feared yet what he will fear for 37 years, and never spoke of to a soul: that he murdered her child by fucking her."

  Mapping becomes an act of survival, necessity; she must find a way to name, place, and thereby accept "This awkward, scary love, the way / snow falls everywhere, the way rivers / leap their banks in spring, and sunlight warns us." In keeping with the sharp and brilliant complexity of the book, Fisher-Wirth recognizes that this is a flawed process, even a sickening form of escapism--"You get to the point where everything becomes metaphor, / everything becomes signal. / Then you sicken." However, she also realizes that this is all she can do, and directly challenges both the reader and her lover to disagree: "He writes back, 'It's too easy, / turning bodies into words.' Yes, / too easy  but tell me, what would you do?"

  With a fierce and wrenching honesty, Fisher-Wirth forces herself through the process of cartography, which allows her to finally feel the emotions covered by thirty-seven years of silence: "One day the waters have their skin on. // The next day, after thirty-seven years, / a voice, a stone falls through." Able finally to face the situation as it was, the bald mapped facts of it, Fisher-Wirth is finally able to grieve for the stillborn daughter she carries "forever, whose shadowy face is turned forever away from her," and to love the men of her past and of her present: "Oh the heart / wants it all, every lover forever in me, / every lick of the setting sun wetting the wintry birch trees."

  Through mapping her life in language, Fisher-Wirth works beyond her metaphor to the raw and real truth behind the words, which are, after all, just words--"Friend is just a word. / Love is just a word. / In love is just two words." However, like the key of a map, these words act as tools and symbols to direct her in a journey towards revelation, revision, and rebirth. It is the gruesome and glorious cartography of language that leads her "towards hunger and toward plentitude," and also towards healing: "I said to Peter, 'Now I will turn the wheel / and finish the cycle with spring poems.'" In this season of rebirth, during which "seeds, seeds / riot in the ground," Fisher-Wirth is able to move beyond mapping and even beyond language to the center itself, the source of love and life and grief, "The split heart-- // The heart still split-- // All this human love and anguish--"

  ___________
  Emma Bolden is the author of three chapbooks of poetry. Her work has appeared numerous journals, including Indiana Review, The Journal, Feminist Studies, Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Verse, and Green Mountains Review,/i. She was a finalist for a Ruth Lily Fellowship. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing at Georgetown College, where she also serves as poetry editor of the Georgetown Review.

• BooklistMay 15, 2009

  Only two copies exist of the Carta Marina, a sixteenth-century map drawn by Swedish historian Olaus Magnus in the ornate style of the time, with monsters cavorting in the seas around Sweden and nearby lands and islands. Mapping the territory is the dominating metaphor of this intimate poetic narrative, and the territory mapped--the powerful sexuality of women in midlife and its complex relationship to loss--is, while familiar to its inhabitants, as unknown to Western literature as Scandinavia was to the centers of medieval power. Using a variety of poetic forms, from found-poems in the language of Olaus Magnus to prose poems to expansive free verse, Fisher-Wirth creates the story of the return of a long-lost lover and the attendant reclamation of anguished memories to map the timelessness of love despite encroaching mortality. The wintry landscapes of Scandinavia ironically reflect the cultural expectation of an aging woman's cool wisdom, but the poet shows instead that love's heat warms and even burns at any age. A breakthrough book from a significant poet.

  _____________
  Reviewed by Patricia Monaghan

• "revelation and exposure, vulnerability and risk"

  ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature ...)Winter 2010

  The journey taken here is about revelation and exposure, vulnerability and risk. [Fisher-Wirth] enters a layered map of time, a striated diary of place. For her a map is the skin of the world, and her poems are epidermal layers that both protect and reveal. Ann Fisher-Wirth's map in Carta Marina is as rich, complex, and luscious as the territory it describes. As she considers the monsters and the magic of her world, she maps "the two motions of the soul, / toward hunger and toward plenitude" (48). -- Patrick Lawler, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry

• The Territory of Naming:

  Gently Read LiteratureJuly 1, 2010

  Reviewed by Lynn Thompson in [Gently Read Literature]

  Any decent dictionary or thesaurus will tell you that the word map may be utilized as either a noun or a verb. As in "flat representation of the earth's surface, or a part of it..."; as in "to arrange in detail, to depict, to portray". The perfunctory reader of Ann Fisher-Wirth's Carta Marina might assert that it's a book of poems that provides interesting particulars of the earliest-known map of Sweden ("A/Contains in this most ample region/The Isles of Scandia"), among other seemingly narrative biographical details. But Fisher-Wirth enters the territory of naming and action of personal and national history, current and past, with such lyric precision, such intensity, and, unexpectedly, with the thrill of the unknown, that the reader is transported beyond the superficial tease that the lovely cover of this collection depicts.

  Unobtrusively, however, the poet guides the reader in the opening poem: "First/notice..." This enjambed instruction has the effect of slowing the reader's pace so that taking the journey at a leisurely pace is a mandate from the very beginning. That sense of leisureliness creates, at least for this reader, a kind of tension that propels the action (which is secondary? which primary?) of the compilation.

  Next, Fisher-Wirth prepares the reader to embrace the necessary flexibility inherent in the element of time that is so crucial to the book's underpinnings. The first poem, as with others that follow, is untitled but dated: "October 14th". The reader is locked firmly into a timeline but surmises, instinctively, that past and present will surely have a hand in the narrative ("Dreams coming down now, atomies of dreams--") and the reader is not disappointed in this supposition. Intertwined within the narrator's story of her sojourn while on sabbatical ("in Sweden ten months, two gone already--"), are fragments of e-mails to and from a former lover ("yes, you were 19 and I was 18"), now residing, these many years later, in Paris. With one deft move, the poet effectively and beguilingly conflates memory with current reality, a reality shared with her husband who has joined her in her academic quest in Scandinavia. By October 19th, the narrator has locked the reader into a meditation on lost time as she begins to separate mindfully from the task at hand--to chart Swedish history as revealed by its earliest cartographer--so as to recapture "the thread of [her] life...."

  Her secret begins to reveal itself when the narrator provides the reader more than a hint ("...wilder than Olaus Magnus' Norway/the ultrasound/bloody red screen...") of a never-forgotten relationship and its aftermath which are at the heart of these poems; of the boy who "never tell(s) her why he vanished" as she--always aware of current reality--harkens back, traveling full circle, to the map "lost for many years".

  For this reviewer to tell more of the tale is to deprive the reader of the wondrously-writ mysteries of Carta Marina's "angel with the stubborn underjaw". Rather, I'd prefer to quote Fisher-Wirth as she writes "you will gallop me to the edges of the map/and I will lie down there...." Take this book, "hover at the threshold". Savor.

  ___________
  Lynne Thompson won the Perugia Press Book Prize for her first full-length collection of poems, Beg No Pardon, which was also awarded the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a frequent reader, both locally and nationally, Thompson is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: We Arrive By Accumulation and Through A Window. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies including Sou'Wester, Indiana Review, Ploughshares and New Poets of the American West. Thompson is the Director of Employee & Labor Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles.

• ... so masterfully sustains its narrative, so subtly maintains its urgency, that it cannot be put down ...

  Emprise Review2010

  Reviewed by J. Gabriel Scala in [Emprise Review]

  Lost to public knowledge for more than three hundred years, Olaus Magnus' map of the Nordic countries, the Carta Marina, is the basis of Ann Fisher-Wirths third full-length collection, Carta Marina: A Poem in Three Parts. Using a variety of forms and a consistent chronology, Carta Marina is one of those rare book-length poems that so masterfully sustains its narrative, so subtly maintains its urgency, that it cannot be put down once opened until the entire thing has been read--and then we must, absolutely must, turn immediately to the first page and begin all over again.

  Beginning in late fall and moving purposefully and urgently to mid-spring, Carta Marina brings multiple worlds--the physical, the emotional, the spiritual, and the intellectual--to light. As both a poet and an academic, Fisher-Wirth displays incredible skill in crafting each and every poem, and she leaves her laborious research out in the open--unapologetic--in a move that grounds the emotional highs and lows that bring us as readers to the brink of disaster.

  The book opens with a bare facts description of the Carta Marina, situating readers in the historical context of the poem:

  The Carta Marina, "the earliest map to present a fairly accurate picture of Sweden and its neighbouring countries,"* was completed after twelve years' labor by the Swedish historian Olaus Magnus in 1539.... Made of nine woodcuts, the map measures 170 X 125 centimeters.

  And then, like the bear of the opening poem, Fisher-Wirth takes her scholarship and "presses it like a lover, / wraps one arm around its neck, sinks [her] teeth // into its shoulder" (3)--until we are lost in the swirl of finely crafted lines and gorgeous images, almost missing entirely the historical and cultural value of the work she's done. Almost. Early poems in the collection guide us along the wooden contours of the map's surface. It is a map of a people, to be sure, but the Carta Marina's history--having been completely lost for a period of time, even to the point where its very existence was questioned--works as a metaphor for the poet's lost history, for all of our lost histories freshly recalled, painfully remembered and seen again with new eyes.

  Fisher-Wirth carves layers of narrative onto the surface of the Carta Marina. Using a diary format that keeps the reader grounded in time, the poem shifts deftly between breathtaking depictions of the Swedish landscape, correspondence between the speaker and her former lover, and anguished reflections on both a life lost and a life that is starkly, beautifully, simplistically steadfast. The tragedy lying in the foreground of the poem is that of the speaker's child who "shifted and grew, an / elbow, a knee sculpting her side, its small life thrumming in her / bloodstream" (18) and the dawning knowledge of "the smear of blood on the toilet paper, / then at her walking / back to the bed, / still naked, / and everything different forever then" (16). Under the engraving of this loss lies another, more recent and shadowy loss--that of the speaker's students, Chuck and Jonathan, who are so subtly woven into the text that the students and lost child blend and meld into the loss of all "the babies, the babies in their gray coffins" (26).

  In the crevices of this loss lie the relationships--strewn haphazardly about. The speaker and her former lover exchange emails, ask long silenced questions, and the danger in the fact that he is "In love with me again--or, he says, still--" (40) hangs precipitously in the air above the others: his family, her husband. And though Carta Marina delves deeply into what it means to be human, to be inconveniently confronted and momentarily lost in what-might-have-been, it is the relationship sitting silently, patiently by that defines this masterful narrative. It is the moment of dawning realization that reminds us not only of our own humanity but of the humanity of those who surround us:

  Peter and me naked in virulent color
  sprawled on a beach, a sandy hillside, us scarlet,
  cobalt, gold, electric--his beautiful burly torso, sharp knees,
  cock lying soft against his thigh, beyond him my body naked,
  us sloping gently flushed rosy and crimson, this was when I knew
  we were married eternally, and I say "Yes, yes,"
  to my friend, "that was a good vacation," while all the while
  I'm thinking, What have I done? What have I done? (43-44)
  

  Carta Marina: A Poem in Three Parts wraps layer upon layer, blends old deaths with fresh ones, ties the steadfast silence to the raging roar, and covers it all under the "Red roofs" of Sweden, of Paris, "this clayey red / as if someone remembered Mississippi" (12). And this is where Fisher-Wirth's brilliance really shines. Like true emotion and experience, one tragedy molds itself into the next, one great love slides atop another, until we are unable to see where the knife first struck, the individual cuts blur into a spectacular vision of pain and beauty. The Carta Marina lays Sweden bare as Fisher-Wirth's poem of the same name lays bare the complexities of human loss, the compromises and sacrifices of human relationships, and the power of the human heart, "The split heart-- / The heart still split--". It is itself a map, whispering the cartographer's secrets and guiding us always through "All this human love and anguish" (75).

  ___________
  J. Gabriel Scala received an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University and a Ph.D in English from the University of Mississippi. She has published poetry and reviews in numerous publications and her chapbook, Twenty Questions for Robbie Dunkle (2004), was published by Kent State University Press.

• Off the edge of the map, off the edge of the known life, here be monsters.

  Blackbird, Vol 9, no. 2Fall 2010

  Reviewed by Amy Unsworth

  Like a cartographer unsatisfied to abandon the old map with the notation "Here Be Monsters" in the empty spaces, the speaker in Ann Fisher-Wirth's latest book of poetry, Carta Marina, explores the past's landscape and encounters the dangers of dallying at the edge of her known life. The poet deftly portrays the emotional crisis occasioned by an old lover's resurfacing and the choices the speaker must make as she faces her past, contends with emotions, and considers the other people whose lives will be affected by her decisions. The book chronicles the journey through the emotional damage of a life denied and the process necessary to live wholly despite experiencing incompleteness and loss.

  Carta Marina,'s three sections reflect the ups and downs and the confusions of the emotional terrain. Written like a diary, the book is composed of individually dated poems chronicling the ebb and flow of the speaker's emotional crises, much like Olaus Magnus's original "Carta Marina" and the mapmaker's accompanying notes. And mimicking the creator of the map, the speaker continuously adds another detail more, desiring to insert yet one more facet that might help more fully contain the story. She finds it impossible to avoid incompletion, impossible to fill all the spaces where monsters dwell, impossible to avoid an ending despite the fact that pieces of the heart do not yet fit neatly together. The individual poems demonstrate strong line breaks and internal line spacing that tends toward controlled fragmentation, like breath reined in by effort alone.

  Carta Marina covers the unstable terrain of the heart and memory, difficult to map due to the mutability of emotion and memory: "How do you carve these currents in your woodblocks?" The poems provide figurative representation of the emotions: calm waters, bloodstreams, and the way that at a moment of emotional crisis, "the waters closed over us both." The fluidity motif reappears in rivers, the sea, ice shards, and even wine throughout the linked poems that comprise the book. For the speaker, emotion is fluid, temporal, untidy, ugly, and visceral, like this description of an image on the actual Carta Marina:

  Gnashing their teeth, the pig-faced
  whales
  furl spray
  backward from spoutholes
  that extend like gut or sausage
  

  Emotion rises up and troubles the waters, time and again.

  The poet utilizes the horse as a symbol of the self, demonstrating the speaker's attempts to bridle emotion. The mature view she posits, of "it's just emotions," suggests that taming emotion should be possible and that doing so would make life tidy, easier to cope with and more precise:

  Where like good little ponies, staunch soldiers,
  Olaus Magnus's identical
  woodcut trees
  march along Frisia
  

  Fisher-Wirth's conceits address challenging concepts such as the question of whether feelings, in their fleeting temporal existence, can be considered real. In "December 3" the speaker has doubts about the reality of the borealis she witnessed on the horizon. If it is difficult to concretely identify something she sees, how much more difficult to identify emotions held in memorys wavering grip? Just as the borealis can be misidentified, perhaps what she remembers as love can also be misidentified because memory can recall things not quite true. The speaker sometimes retells the same story differently to tidy up the past, as in the pair of poems "October 28" and "October 30". Her first attempt at the story begins "Heart, you are gazing / at a girl," contradicted by "No, say it this way," in the subsequent version. In both of these and several later poems, the speaker corrects and amends the narrative, discovering along the way that "memory misremembers." If the memory of what might have been is compelling enough, the memory could be amended yet again, making it difficult to chart what she originally felt during the events or what really occurred.

  As in Five Terraces, Fisher-Wirth's second collection, Carta Marina centers on an art piece as an organizing device for the narrative. In Five Terraces, the poet utilizes a scroll as a guide to reading the poem, while the map in Carta Marina is included as a baseline of reality. The map is a touchstone to help the speaker discern between reality and feelings that were fleeting or even only imagined. The juxtaposition of the descriptive poem sections with a facsimile of the actual map demonstrates how language can never encompass the entirety of the real object or experience -- how something must always be lost between the sign and the signified, between the word and the translation of the word, between the world and the representation of the world. Even the map, the "real" object, is no longer a true representation of the land and seascape; after years of erosion and change, the current geography certainly no longer corresponds to Olaus Magnus's creation.

  In the end, the book becomes a lament for a life that can't be mapped completely; no matter how hard the speaker tries, some outcomes are simply unknowable, some memories unchartable. She cannot "go back to that moment before the moment." The past cannot be reshaped, except in the imagination, and such reshaping would be terrifying, demanding the erasure of her known life, husband, and children. Though she realizes, "I knew I could live / through this free fall, could permit the sea to flood / the open window," she also knows that to imagine this shadow life would mean losing her "golden daughters" and her "beloved, actual" husband. To return is impossible anyway. The coastline has changed with time; the lover, risen from the "icy mercury blackness," is changed into the father of a son "the age of that moody boy" she once loved. All that remains is the opportunity to "get on the dark bus and let it carry" her to wherever it may lead, through the emotional landscape of her life.

  Carta Marina demonstrates Fisher-Wirth's skill at the layering and accumulation of details to evoke emotion, notable in the section that begins with "December 1" as the speaker searches the body to discover if it holds any solutions to the matter of the heart, if under the skin there exists a corporeal answer to all the troublesome emotional queries. The details accrue: the flayed man who is the correlative object for a wife, the "nearly frozen Fyris River," the waters that "have their skin on," and the examination rooms of "The Anatomical Theater." When she examines the body without all the bothersome mess of the heart, she realizes, "How hollow / hollow is. / The entrails gone. / The ribcage soaring." No one can live without the untidiness, without the visceral pleasure and agony.

  The essentialness of love, a major theme from Five Terraces, becomes a difficulty in Carta Marina. In "December 18," the speaker ponders the role of love in making decisions:

  Oh no, Horsey, we have not solved the problem of love.
  . . .
  You will gallop me to the edges of the map
  and I will lie down there
  

  Off the edge of the map, off the edge of the known life, here be monsters. The poem is a tender description of the hazards of trading a known life for the thin ice of the unknown, exchanging the solid, actual love for one that has arisen like an impossible-to-ignore whale from some deep sea of memory. The speaker struggles to discern if this old emotion is fleeting like the borealis, something she can at last give up:

  up from my heart, throat, and away from me,
  giving it
  into the night air
  as you, Horsey, graze peacefully on ice shards.
  

  Carta Marina maps, in credible detail, the moments as the heart swerves and the balance of life quakes in the immensity of facing down the past or choosing to lose oneself in that past. As the crisis passes, the speaker chooses to collect her breath and continue, accepting incompleteness and the unavoidable blankness at the margins of the map. Her world settles back again in the reassurance of a life, and a book, built moment-by-moment into something sturdy and strong enough to encompass

  The split heart --
  the heart still split --
  All this human love and anguish --
  

  _____________________

  This review first appeared in [Blackbird: An Online Jou8rnal of Literature and the Arts]

  Amy Unsworths poetry has appeared in Tar River Poetry, The Pedestal Magazine, The Briar Cliff Review, and 60 Seconds to Shine. Unsworth earned her MA in British and American Literature from Kansas State University.

• Mapmaking

  Smartish Pace

  Read the review at [SmartishPace]

  Reviewed by Joelle Biele

  "We have not solved the problem of love, / have we?" asks Ann Fisher-Wirth in her book-length poem, Carta Marina. Fisher-Wirth, a professor of English and Environmental Studies at the University of Mississippi, spent ten months as a Fulbright professor at Sweden's Uppsala University where she became fascinated with the literal Carta Marina, a rare fifteenth-century map of Scandinavia housed in the university library, which became the framework for her Carta Marina, a map of the ties that hold people together and pull them apart. A book of unflinching honesty, Carta Marina is an absorbing meditation on love and grief.

  Organized chronologically over the course of the 2002-2003 school-year, Carta Marina reads like a novella. The book centers on the reappearance of a lost love. After decades of silence, the man, now a doctor living in Paris, contacts the speaker by email. They begin corresponding, and soon memories of the speaker's failed pregnancy begin to surface. In two moving, back-to-back poems, "October 28" and "October 30," she recalls what happened after the first signs of miscarriage. Speaking of herself as "the girl" and the man, who remains nameless throughout the book, as "the boy," she says:

  With that blood,
  oh her warm
  body soft as a moth's wings
  starts down its long
  road toward November,
  toward the forceps,
  the stillbirth, the hospital bed—
  

  The line-breaks emphasize the impact of the loss, slowing it down by breaking after the adjectives, and leave the story hanging on the dash. What follows this organic lyric is a prose poem that again pictures the pair asleep in bed, bluntly reporting that moment before the moment when the boy did not fear what he will fear for 37 years, and never spoke of to a soul: that he murdered her child by fucking her. With the story in two strikingly different forms and additional details emerging later in the book, sometimes revising preceding lines and previous poems, the speaker's struggle with this loss is clear.

  One of Carta Marina's most appealing characteristics is its candor. Fisher-Wirth does not shy away from showing her speaker's conflicting emotions. Contemplating her entrance into old age and learning of her declining health, she is aware that reconnecting with the man could hurt her husband. In one of Carta Marina's standout poems, "April 10," the speaker is torn between her long, satisfying marriage and the memory of transfiguring love. On that snowbound day, she writes:

  My leg across Peter's belly,
  I said, I love you both, and he smiled,
  held me. He said I love what is real.
  

  Her husband's understanding of her need is both tender and profound. By April 20, the speaker is preparing to let the man and child go.

  As counterpoints to the speaker's story, Fisher-Wirth includes poems and images that develop the themes of lost youth and love. As she says in "November 2," You get to the point where "everything becomes metaphor, / everything becomes signal." One poem is about the murdered student activist Rachel Corrie and others refer to the deaths of former students and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In "March 30" the speaker relays the story of witnessing a young woman giving up her child for adoption in the same hospital where she was recovering from giving birth. Using images of the wintry Swedish landscape to address an urgent sense of mortality, she also has some superb passages on the Gustavinium's Anatomical Theater and its paintings of the human body to illustrate the many sides of the speaker's psychological state.

  Throughout Carta Marina are poems about the map, which is reproduced in full in the book's center. The map poems serve as points of reprieve from the rest of Carta Marina's intensity. These poems attempt to visually recreate the map by playing with the margins and typography, so the reader can share the speaker's fascination with cartographer Olaus Magnus's images and stylized prose. Like Elizabeth Bishop, Fisher-Wirth sees a parallel between the poet's work and the map-maker's. Both are intent on accurately describing their worlds.

  My only hesitation about the book is what feels like an over-determined beginning and an almost closed end, the problem of getting into and out of the story. The first poem neatly lays out the major themes, which was perhaps meant to serve as a key. The penultimate poem is a catalog of goodbyes, creating an artificial sense of closure. By announcing goodbye, writing it, as Bishop would say, but without her punning irony, the speaker draws what seems like unnecessary attention to a need that is already clear. The poems interfere with the book's narrative suppleness, which Fisher-Wirth renders so beautifully throughout Carta Marina and in its last lines:

  The split heart—
  The heart still split—
  All this human love and anguish—
  

  Fisher-Wirth writes with great sensitivity and intelligence. She is a poet of terrific formal dexterity. As her images accumulate, she creates depth and contrast, variety and coherence. Fisher-Wirth tells her story with haunting power. She makes a map of many shades.