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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

• "searingly beautiful"

  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: Theres 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.