A Ghost Maps Review

Local poet evokes poignancy of soldier's sacrifice in war

ROBERT REID

(The Record, Nov 8, 2003)

Although it commemorates the armistice that ended the First World War, Remembrance Day honours all who sacrificed their lives in war. So it's appropriate for a book that traces the life of a Second World War veteran to be launched the day after Remembrance Day. And that's exactly what's happening to Kitchener poet Erin Noteboom's debut collection, Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska. The book's official release takes place Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the Hamlin Room, in the Lower Level of Kitchener Public Library.

Winner of the CBC Literary Award in 2001, Ghost Maps is Noteboom's first collection. However, her work has appeared in such prestigious publications as The Malahat Review, PRISM international and The New Quarterly, where she is an editor.

The book began as research Noteboom did in 1996 for what she expected would be a novel about the Second World War. Her research led her to a veteran living in Kansas, whom she interviewed over eight months. While he was candid and open about his experiences, he asked to remain anonymous -- a request Noteboom has honoured, even after his death.

As often happens with art, Noteboom's intent evolved through execution. The result was not a novel, but a collection of poems that spanned more than the period the veteran spent as an infantryman overseas in late 1944 and early 1945 when he was injured. He eventually lost a leg.

A thumbnail's trace
across his forehead:
field medic marking dosage
with blue skin pencil.

For a moment,
it's all he can feel.

When they loosen his boot
he asks for blessing.

Noteboom has chosen a name for her unidentified soldier, who haunts the battlefields of her creative imagination as much as the battlefields of Europe. While the poems are based on the experiences of a particular soldier and the life he lived after returning home, Carl Hruska comes to represent Everyman. As such, the fragments recollected in tranquility, and in horror, constitute a remembrance of all whom we ought not to forget.

Ghost Maps is divided into three interconnected sections. The first and longest section, spanning the four seasons, deals with Carl's experiences on the battlefield. The other sections, How Much of the Memory and Empty Page, deal with Carl's life after the war including his career as a horticulturalist, his marriage to the woman he wrote to from overseas, the weddings of his daughters and his wife's death. His own death is also commemorated.

All of the poems are lyric, ranging in length from a few short, almost Haiku-like, lines to a full page. Throughout they are reflective and meditative. In their totality, the mood is elegiac, even as they celebrate the worthy life of a good man.

The poems are so deeply moving because Noteboom eschews sentimentality. Feeling runs deep, but there is nothing cliched or hackneyed. This is all the more
amazing because the poems concentrate on the common, ordinary minutiae of life, whether in time of war or in time of peace.

Similarly, Noteboom's language is as simple and immediate as it is direct and accessible. There are no linguistic tricks, cheap or otherwise. She is a poet who understands that life and language are their own eloquence when honest and authentic.

From Kansas,
slowly,
he learned
silence

The grass comes up
through last year's grass

At noon
hills cast
no shadows

Deer bones yellow
no stink of rot

It became,
again,
his
native country

Merging past and present, old world and new world, life and death, voice and text, Ghost Maps confirms the power of art to record both what we remember and what we imagine. For we need both as compassionate, sympathetic human beings who share in the pain, suffering and sorrow, along with the delight, exhilaration and joy, of living before we all pass on.