Synopsis:

From Wings Press:

Ann Fisher-Wirth began Carta after a phone conversation with her daughter, Jessica Fisher, who is also a poet. As the author describes it:

I was telling her about this wonderful map I had discovered at the Carolina Museum in Uppsala, and she said, "Write poems about the map." "Oh," I replied, "I might write a poem about it," and she said, "I said write poems about the map." The next day, I went to the museum, sat on the floor in front of the wall-sized glass case that held the map, and began to write. The poem bears all the traces of its coming into existence. It unfolds as the year unfolded; it weaves together the various strands of which the year, with its descent into winter and gradual ascent into an agonized spring, was made. When I began to write Carta Marina, I had no idea of the events that would soon shake my life, when what Shakespeare calls the "dim backward and dark abysm of time," came alive once more. During the past few years, I have heard of many people who have reconnected with long-lost friends or lovers through the phenomenon of email. In part, Carta Marina is about such a reconnection and the ways in which it can or cannot coexist with a happy marriage, a reconnection made especially powerful by the fact that it reawakens grief for a long-ago stillborn child. It is about the ways in which the heart can open, and open, and open and can, with great difficulty, negotiate various forms of love, creating a path that honors both what is lost and what remains.

The first largely accurate map of the Northern Countries, completed by the Swedish historian Olaus Magnus in 1539, the map called "Carta Marina" explodes with phantasmagoria. Trolls, sea serpents, reindeer, lions, warriors, monsters all coexist in the map; and in the poem they become metaphors for the wildness, the realm of dream and terror, that constantly haunts our constructions of order. Carta Marina the book is as intense, beautiful, and strange as the map that inspired it.

Book Excerpt:

Now snow
comes down fast through lead-white skies
on the graves across the way
which are not graves, as I had fantasized, of seafarers,
farmers,
but of men and women who turned to books—

Of Svante August Arrhenius
who predicted global warming,
Dag Hammarskjold, his death
in an African plane crash one of the first
I remember, and Lotten von Kraemer, writer,
her beautiful face carved in profile
on her own—surprise—enormous headstone.

Of Erik Gustaf Geijer, whose students gave him the meadhorn,
and Gustaf Fröding, poet, crazy,
with the most candles of all, I counted them, nine—
who got into trouble for his notorious
poem, “A Morning Dream,”
which he called
to the end of his life “an exercise in purity,”

And of all the Carins and Folkes, Belias,
Jennys, Lennarts, Hjalmars, the babies
unbearably pitiful
buried outside the cemetery borders;

We listened to Verdi’s “Requiem” at Uppsala Cathedral
and I realized, suddenly, eis…eis…
this music is praying not for us, the living, but for them…

Praying
grant them peace, Lord,
Chuck and Jonathan my students, grant
the babies, the babies in their gray coffins peace, Lord…

Snow furs the curved tiles
of the roof outside my window,
and snow licks the wall beneath the tiles
painted that Swedish red
like burning cheeks, like summer,

Like the future memory of the matter,
in this universal orb of luft and eld and jord and vatten.

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Author Comment:

Carta Marina goes right to the heart of issues that many people are dealing with these days, given the advent of the internet and email and, consequently, the return of people's past into their present. I would love to give readings, teach this book, or meet with reading groups about this book.

Topics/Categories:

cartography, Marriage, Memoir, Poetry, Sweden

Genre:

Poetry

Type of Work:

Poetry Collection

Publishers:

WINGS Press

Purchase From:

Independent Publishers Group
Independent Publishers Group

Original Publish Date:

April 1, 2009

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