Ghost Maps

News about Ghost Maps

Reviews

• from The Record
• from Plum Ruby Review

Back Cover Blurbs

These poems are the best that language can give us. They startled me into tears. With the bravery of a Gwendolyn MacEwen taking on the uneasy life of T.E. Lawrence, Erin Noteboom gets inside the heart and head of a WWII veteran who doesn’t even want his name to be mentioned. Instead, what we get is blood-warm imagery, the taste of a story, and a rare, hard-won wisdom …. Make room for these ghosts because the minute you start reading this book, they will lift off the page and walk into your world.

—Lorna Crozier, poet, winner of the Governor General’s award

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?” …. 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, poet, editor of milieu press

Order Ghost Maps: $17.50 CAD/USD