Carta Marina: A Poem in Three Parts (review)

Ann Fisher-Wirth looks to the Carta Marina, a map created in 1539 by the Swedish historian Olaus Magnus, as one way of knowing her world. An amalgam of science and mythology, the map with its fanciful imagery makes its impress on her consciousness. Without being ponderous, Fisher-Wirth weaves her poems about the map's dimensions and imagery into the reality of living in Uppsala, Sweden, where she's on a Fulbright professorship with her husband, Peter, and where she receives an unexpected e-mail from a former boyfriend now living in Paris. This intrusion into her present life from the past allows her to posit an alternate story—a myth—of her life. Setting her life in the context of the Carta Marina, Fisher-Wirth creates the dynamic tension of this book of poems.

In section 1, poems about the map predominate, as Fisher-Wirth tries to puzzle out its arcane mysteries. Journal-like, the poems carry simple dates as titles. In "October 26," for example,

Two very large sea monsters      The one truculent with its teeth            The other horrible with its horn.

An erect whale sinks a big ship      With a look of dogged satisfaction.

A fisherman striking the ice with an ax      Stuns and captures the fish beneath.

Sometimes there is disaster; sometimes, human endeavor achieves the desired result. Fisher-Wirth's imagery captures a range of activity, the everyday and the macabre: "Demons serve themselves on the flesh of captured men."

Interspersed among these poems are others that are chiefly biographical. In "Fragment: Email to Paris," dated October 20th, the poet tells her old boyfriend she is "glad" he's told his wife about their correspondence. She speaks of her desire "not [to] lose the thread of one's life, but allow it / to be transformed, so that loss / is not the whole story." This desire turns into one of the major themes of the volume.

In "October 21," the poet writes of pain in her chest so penetrating she can't sleep. While on a train ride, she sees "schoolgirls in jackets their hair down their backs." They "chatter together happily." There is wistfulness in the schoolgirl image. The poet is not so young—or so blissful because "Something is all wrong in my back and the bones of my chest feel crushed. Is it my heart's hurt?"

The author's struggles with pain lead her back to the Carta Marina and its images. In "October 25," she focuses on a demon "In a crown of what seem daggers." On this same day she goes for an ultrasound. She can see on the screen, "wilder than Olaus Magnus' Norway," her own heart "bloody red" and "throbbing and pulsing." Instead of being repulsed by this image, she feels "grateful to it / for pumping steadily, / for not being too big." While the heart's image is "wilder" than anything the cartographer could imagine, it's eminently real. There's nothing physically wrong with her heart.

Fisher-Wirth queries the mapmaker in a subsequent poem, asking "how do you map this sea, Olaus Magnus?" The poem then evolves into the human story of "a girl in whose belly a child quickens" and "a boy who keeps house with her":

a boy who will blame his bodythat warm midnight and nevertell her, nevertell her why he vanished—

In bringing the past experience into the present, in seeking guidance from Magnus, the poet is trying to pull the threads of her life together, thus allowing the emotional wound "to be transformed."

The lyrical form of "October 28" yields to the prosier "October 30," when the poet senses that her subject requires something more explanatory. Even so, the lyrical impulse remains as she describes the two young lovers "drift[ing] like leaves along calm water." Then we come to the abrupt, "After thirty-seven years he has emailed. He's a doctor in Paris, he found me in Sweden." Once she got pregnant, he tells her, "You drew into...