a review of:
The Cartographer’s Tongue
Poems by Susan Rich
Buffalo, New York: White Pine Press, 2000
106 pp, Paper $14.00
ISBN: 1-893996-06-9

Seattle poet Susan Rich has lived in Africa and in the Middle East as a member of the Peace Corps and on a Fullbright Fellowship. She's also been active in Amnesty International and recently served as an electoral supervisor for national elections in Bosnia. This first book of poems (her second is due out in January of 2006) has won the PEN West poetry award as well as a Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award. It should be no surprise, then, that many of the poems in The Cartographer’s Tongue explore her experiences overseas.

These poems capture an intriguing contradiction: on the one hand, the poet has always wanted to explore the world, as in “Mapparium,” a childhood memory of exploring “the Mapparium on a field trip/. A made-up word we learn /for the place where the world resides.” Her reaction is immediate: “Feet to Antarctica, arms outstretched/ like beacons toward Brazil,/ I'll take this globe as my own.” That sense of being at home in the world pervades many of the poems.

On the other hand, lines such as these from “Lost by Way of Tchin-Tabarden” present the poet as outsider: “Nomads are said to know their way by an exact spot in the sky,/ the touch of sand to their fingers, granules on the tongue.// But sometimes a system breaks down.../...Why am I traveling/ this road to Zindar, where really there is no road?” Later in that same poem she'll admit “I feel relief at the abandonment of my own geography.” That she has a geography of her own implies, of course, that the geography elsewhere isn't really hers.

That uneasy juxtaposition of seasoned world traveler and a feeling of never quite belonging out there in the world is one of the fascinations of this collection. But only one. Some of the most powerful poems evoke the agony of the world through which we all travel these days, as in this exploration of the contrast between a word’s sound and its meaning from “Atopos: Without Place”:

“Atrocity is such a luscious word,
Delicate, ebullient, pure.
The ting glass makes as it shatters
Against glass; the timbre of a whimper
Arching upwards to a shriek--”

Indeed, at times the poet almost despairs over the difficulty of capturing such a world in words. “In the Language of Maps” finds a metaphor for that difficulty: “The mapmaker is measuring the earth,/ seeking the accurate. She knows her projection /must distort the geography of the world.” Perhaps the very stability of every sort of geography depends on the cartographer/poet: “She'll work to ensure that Denver stays/its correct distance from Milan,/that the Nile finds its way to Lake Nasser.”

She also encounters peoples to whom the written word is itself a danger, as in “Lessons in the Desert,” where teaching a Nomad boy how to write his name “Made them whip the bridge/ of his nose, the lashes and soft lids/ as if to keep his eyes shut tight,// closed against schools of any sort.../Survival meant to keep him/from slipping away,/ from getting lost in the lines of the page.” The realization that the loss of a single tribal member lessens the tribe’s chances of survival is a sobering one. In such a world, how does one choose?

The poet isn't certain. “The Toughest Job” explores her question, “What can my students learn?”

“To sit exams set up for failure;
Master percentages and fractions
Exacting how much income
Abduhl will never make--”

Language takes another shape in “Taoseno,”

“Even the sun is different here:
more generous along its heliotrope horizon
and people, too
shape their words more thoughtfully,
in sentences slower
than I've known before
as if language itself
is an impediment to knowing
what they know.”

That last is a frightening thought not just to the poets among us: that “language itself might be an impediment to knowing.”

Movement across the landscape itself leads to other insights, as in “Train Travel,” where the poet first realizes that “Everything is an echo/of the thing it thinks it is,” and later wonders “where my other self is bound for, where in the end are the worlds we leave behind.”

Sometimes that other self finds love, or something like it, though often with questions such as this from “The Place”: “How did we get here?” Later the poem will offer lines which are almost an answer: “It is the search/for the world we wanted...”

At times she is tempted to give up questioning. “The Filigree of the Familiar” promises “…if we just stand still/a warrantee will be provided/with instructions for our lives:/how to settle for less, how not to grow old.” Nonetheless, for this poet the quest will continue. As she says in “1 January 1999,” she will continue to believe that “Everything is still/possible. Each/ordinary thing appears/as new:...”

Susan Rich will appear at the 7th annual Whidbey Island Writers Conference, March 4 - 6, 2005. For information, visit www.writeonwhidbey.org or call (360)331-6714.

The Cartographer’s Tongue is available at Book Bay in Freeland and The Moonraker in Langley.

A reformed fiddlefoot, Wayne Ude grew up in Montana, earned an MFA from UMass-Amherst, directed social services programs in Montana and Massachusetts, taught in and directed creative writing programs on the MA level for 17 years, and has published four books of fiction. Since 1993 he has lived, written, and taught on Whidbey Island.