“A Cartographer’s Lament, II: You Know How I Feel About Maps”
To put a city in a book, to put the world on one sheet of paper – maps are the most condensed humanized spaces of all…They make the landscape fit indoors, master of sights we can’t see and spaces we can’t cover… –Robert Harbison, “Eccentric Spaces”
I pity the young people who’ve never touched a paper map, or unfolded one on the hood of a car to let the folds catch drafts of wind to carry it up into the sky, to let it fly like a condor over the Andes. The information they’ve never seen sitting in front of them, asking to be examined, understood. The major highways into Denver and the state roads along Lake Michigan’s east shore, the dangerous slopes of sand dunes, national parks boldly labeled and map scales that help you imagine how small you really are. I feel sorry for the parents who never touched a paper map or unfolded one on the hood of a car to catch a breath of breeze that lifts it up into the sky like a swallowtail searching for nectar. To condense a population of two-and-a half million and house them in a one-centimeter square, colored a light shade of tan to indicate density; to abbreviate the complexity of economic prowess with dots and dashes, interstates colored red like veins; to convey altitude with squiggly concentric circles! These are brilliant vehicles to share with a child, who may be able to tell her grand-mother when to turn and in what direction, but who has never had the thrill of watching a paper canary fly out of her palm into a desert sunset.
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John Dorroh
Review by Jan Wiezorek
In “A Cartographer’s Lament . . . ,” John Dorroh has such a love for maps that he fingers our minds with them. We know what it is for children and parents to touch, unfold, label, share, and discover environment made map-able, with all the symbols of a journey, all the exploration of size and sheer breadth (and breath). Taking a trip along with Dorroh, we map our way into the future, into not only pure land and space, but also into dimensions of imagination through which we may fly.
Review by Nancy Christopherson
This poem delights with deft similes that lift us from the earth and show us things we wouldn’t ordinarily have considered, about maps! This poem takes wing as easily as any feathered thing. We take maps (and feathered things), we hope! for granted every day, during our travels or while consuming the evening news. Ah, where? Ah! There. It happened there. And here! Look. But what was the consideration for the cartographer who painstakingly crafted such an artful vehicle for our free spirits of imagination? Every line in this poem delights and invites the reader to go grab a map from a desk or car’s glove compartment, to open it up, fully, across a dining room table or car’s hood and simply gaze at it, let it show the places we’ve been and the places we’ve never been, the places we long to go, in such sweet detail that we are transported instantly there, A whole city condensed to a square inch! Highways veining the landscape across folds. Soaring across the Andes on wide wings. The reader becomes part of a narrative. Oh, the exquisite expanse of flying out into a desert sunset, climbing up off the page, so clearly, so purely, that a child could do it if she had the singular chance. This poem offers that chance to each reader. The gift of imagination and craft so beautifully paced. What I wish for in every poem: to be transported to the center of a quiet subject like this. Thank you, poet, keep drawing your vivid, spell-binding maps for us.