Carta Marina by Ann Fisher-Wirth
published by Wings Press, reviewed by Carol Dorf
Poets take different approaches to time. While most poets write poems that exist in a timeless present, the poets rarely mentioning the sequence of events between poems, others, such as Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Rita Dove, or the Chilean Nicandor Parra often situate their poems at a determinate moment in time as a technique to prevent history from being excluded from our lives.
Then there are other poets such as Rusty Morrison, the author of The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story, who situate their poems in an ongoing experience through time such as a parent's illness, or a child's first days. In Carta Marina, Ann Fisher-Wirth dates each poem in order to give a sense of the changes in a woman's view of her experience over a relatively short period of time.
Although this technique is rare among poets, fiction writers commonly employ it. Many contemporary genre writers, and even novelists such as William Faulkner, sometimes feature days or dates in their work to situate the reader and add to the fictive illusion.
Carta Marina maps the narrator's life during three seasons of a Sabbatical year in Sweden. The diary form begins in October, just before the fall equinox, and ends with the spring equinox in April. The dates serve multiple functions. First, they tell us that this is a story that is happening now, in the early 21st century. Second, they say the order of time does matter in poetry; it wrests the ownership of narrative from fiction.
In addition to the dates, the repeating motifs of this long poem are the Carta Marina, a map from the 16th century complete with monsters; a past lover whose resurfacing causes turbulence in the narrator's present long-term marriage; a stillbirth; present health challenges; and love in a long-term marriage. The overall structure of the book allows Fisher-Wirth to use a variety of strategies in her poetry: from prose to near-sonnets to email fragments to open-form verse.
December 18, which is at the end of Carta Marina's central "The Coming of Winter" section is illustrative of Fisher-Wirth's strategies. The first section consists of 19 ten-syllable lines:
They tell me that in the old times people
would light candles and just sit in the dark,
resting, being in the dark, and so I
have lit candles and though Uppsala spreads
around me and the Incan music weaves...
and though I her the busses and sometimes
clanking, in what my husband once called this
soulless apartment, here is the shining
dark. We have not solved the problem of love,
have we? My small paper city
waves its banners and candlelight glints
and gleams on its red foil towers, its gold
and emerald windows, its silver domes
and star shield. The candles by the window
are flickering; on the table, calm
and seeking upward, they are like breath
that barely hovers at the threshold of the body. (…)
The poem begins with a deceptively conversational tone, "They tell me that in the old times people," then moves on to a series of contrasts—a Swedish city with Incan music, a soulless apartment and the shining dark, then the central question of the poem and the book, "We have not solved the problem of love,/have we?"
Notice that "have we" at the end of the question returns us, not only to the husband, but to the lover and the reader as well. In the last lines, the candles are "seeking upward, they are like breath/that barely hovers at the threshold of the body." This brings us to the other central question of the poem: coming to terms with the body with its pleasures and its betrayals.
Fisher-Wirth does not complete December 18th with this controlled exploration. Instead the next section of the poem follows a more expansive form.
Oh no, Horsey, we have not solved the problem of love.
Friend is just a word.
Love is just a word.
In love is just two words . . .
And if God is both infinitely far off, and everywhere,
this corresponds to the two motions of the soul,
toward hunger and toward plentitude --
My stillborn daughter's hair beneath my hand
fragile as snow,
and the hot, sweaty scalps of the boisterous children.
For the force behind the movement of time
is a mourning
that will not be comforted --
When sirens go by at 3 a.m. sawing the air
with their Swedish unhurried urgency,
and after the bars close, students
pour into the streets below,
shouting and chattering
and smoking too many cigarettes
and my husband sleeps beside me,
beloved, actual,
You will gallop me to the edges of the map
and I will lie down there
to the ones that pass
like electrolysis
through and through the far fields of my body.
My tongue will cleave to the roof of my mouth
and my hands will burn and shake, lifting love
up from my belly,
up from my heart, throat, and away from me,
giving it
into the night air
as you, Horsey, graze peacefully on ice shards.
In this section, the central themes of the poem take on urgency, like the 3 a.m. sirens. The lost child is presented in contrast to the living children, "My stillborn daughter's hair beneath my hand/fragile as snow,/and the hot, sweaty scalps of the boisterous children." Love for the husband is contrasted with the possibility of a renewed relationship with the lover. The poem says "my husband sleeps beside me, beloved, actual," then "You will gallop me to the edges of the map." By allowing movement between these forms in a single day's "journal entries" of December 18th, Fisher-Wirth follows the meanderings of her heart/mind as the actual, present relationship collides with both the past and potential future relationships with her first lover.
At the end of the long poem, April 20th, Fisher-Wirth reaches closure while resisting closing off her emotions. "There was a day -- three days--/I would have gone with him." However, as she says of the Carta Marina, she resists a final conclusion, writing several endings. The end of the last section reads:
(…)
Light
light
saturating this bowl
of cedar- and birch-ringed bogland.
Promiscuous indiscriminate without reck or care
it pours on the yellow butterfly
the duff of pine needles
the gnarled, back-twisted cedar branch--
The split heart --
The heart still split --
All this human love and anguish --
A poet more anxious about control, or more fearful of emotion might have ended with one of the images of indiscriminant light, but Fisher-Wirth's intensity allows her to take the risks inherent in the conclusion to this poem.
In Carta Marina, Ann Fisher-Wirth, has created a truly adult world, where we must accept that one love closes off the possibility of another, and where we live in the context of our commitments.
REVIEW
Carol Dorf's poems have appeared in Fringe, The Midway, Poemeleon, New Verse News, Edgz, Runes , Feminist Studies , Heresies, Coracle, Poetica, Responsa, The NeoVictorian, Caprice and elsewhere. She is a former editor of Five Fingers Review, and the Barnard Literary Magazine . She's taught in a variety of venues including a science museum, and as a California Poet in the Schools. She now teaches in a large, urban high school. Her work also appeared in the Spring 08 Issue of Babel Fruit.
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