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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.