More Jacket Copy for Ghost Maps

The last of the expected jacket copy blurbs for Ghost Maps came today -- and made my day.

In the foxholes of intimacy, time compresses and expands like the heart. Gestures and images are its only enduring language. Erin Noteboom takes us into a WWII foxhole with "A decent boy" where soldiers sleep in "stooks," leaning against one another like wheat. The understated voice of Noteboom's narrator reveals how the ordinary tenderness and terror of this experience shapes the rest of his life. You will discover that you have never read poems like these before. Neither has the narrator, who cautions "Never put my name on anything, would you, Erin?" As Elaine Scarry suggests, beauty is in the particular. With Woolf-like devotion and acuity, Noteboom tracks the beauty of the specific gestures and images of her narrator and they haunt you long after you have put this book down. -- Betsy Warland 

To call Betsy my mentor would be overstating things -- I had extraordinary two-week retreat with her -- but her ideas, her teaching, and her poetry, and her powerful listening are important to me. I'm moved by this endorsement. Giddy. Again.

Speaking of people I admire.... I should mention the cover art for Ghost Maps also came last week. I only have a slide, so I can't share. Wendy Ewell painted a field in snow, pinks and blues and greys. In the foreground is the shadow of a tree thrown across the snow. In the middle distance, a few trees white with frost. In the distance, a pale line of woods and darker band of sky. The field seems to go on, to slope up. It's beautiful but crossing it would be terrible. A compliment to the poem "Morning." And I didn't know it was missing anything. Thanks, Wendy!