A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent by Gregory Mahrer (review)

A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent is Gregory Mahrer’s first full poetry collection. The book was chosen as a winner of the Fordham University Press Poets Out Loud series by John Yau and is an exploration of internal and external landscapes—notable for the breadth of the author’s imagination and the beauty of his language. Mahrer’s style is a mélange of narrative, elegiac, and lyric: the poems are histories of longing and loss, told with compelling syntax and imagery.

The book is introduced by Yau and is presented in a square format that serves the dual purpose of suggesting an atlas and allowing room for Mahrer’s poems to stretch, as in the opening “Red City,” whose variable line length, indentation, and spacing mimic the ragged outline of a land mass. Mahrer also uses space to emphasize content in “An Unaddressed Envelope Fills with Snow,” “Camera Obscura,” and “Whiteout,” the text of which is appropriately diffuse, describing a muzzling of both the natural world (“The sun too is dying”) and human language (“In place of the alphabet, / a small government stipend”).

The settings of the poems are vague, although titles like “Hinterland,” “Empty Square, Twilight,” “Colony,” and “Icelandia” tease us into the idea of place. Mahrer lives alternately in California and Mexico, thus it is not surprising that A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent includes a handful of Spanish words. Each of the book’s sections also contains a piece that reads like an excerpt of a conquistador’s memoir (“Ciudad de Oro,” “Ciudad de Plata,” and “Ciudad de las Manos”). But ultimately, the book is a cartography of an unknown country:

To a man we felt the bruise of placemissing its address: the far districts strung togetherby imagined filaments, broken and hungry horsessinking beneath a column of air.What voices remained read as an iambic shout.

Nor does Mahrer limit his examination of loss to a time or tense. Some poems reference the distant past, with men feeling the places in their bodies, “where the Pleistocene had laid down its long / ribbons of mud,” with “Miocenian grasslands,” and “alluvial bodies.” The pluperfect is used as a vehicle for examining motives or cataloguing regrets, as in “Refrain” with its, “All along we had wanted the next thing,” or “Itinerary of Fire,” in which the speaker observes, “Had we been given a simpler itinerary / we might have come to a different door.” Present-tense poems describe failed expeditions; even those set in the future are caution-ary, as in “Understory”:

Beyond the declarations of paperor the prurience of strung birdsour disappearance will be as unheraldedas the sleep of trees,as irreversible as inbreath and outcast.

These are poems of ash and water, of roads traveled and cities discovered, destroyed, abandoned. The language is dense, complex, and often startling. In his introduction, Yau draws a connection between A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent and the writings of Henri Michaux and Jorge Luis Borges. Like the work of Michaux, Mahrer’s poetry elicits the surprise often inherent in surrealism. Like Borges (who is directly addressed in one of the poems), Mahrer calls into question the distinction between the waking state and that of dreams.

However, as intellectual as Mahrer may be, his collection is neither prohibitively elusive nor exclusively ethereal. The poet offsets grand, cosmic references—sun, sea, sky, ice, cloud, and the passing of eons—with a fabular attentiveness to concrete details and the persistent presence of a human witness. Thus we encounter lines like, “Even a child’s clay top / outlasts childhood by a millennium or two,” and, “A man with a cane walks from one century to the next.” Mahrer also counteracts the potentially distancing effect of an anonymous narrator by using invitingly intimate and vulnerable imagery, as with, “In the half-open room a thin drift of flour covers the table. / Olives, still vatted and brined, await each guest” (“Itinerary of Fire”) or “Your blue scent...