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Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska is Erin Noteboom’s
remarkable debut collection of poetry. Based on the recollections
of a World War II Veteran who asks to never have his name put on
anything, Ghost Maps introduces us to the intimacies of war with
poems sharp as fragments of metal, and soft as falling snow. With
a voice that belongs not to the veteran that answered her questions,
nor quite to herself, Noteboom pulls forward images of war, following
the pulse of the seasons. We read of a hand, unattached to a body and
mistaken for a glove; the woman left at home, with German POWs
shoveling snow from her roof; and a soldier stumbling into a
beehive. Poems pass through fall and winter, until in summer
we follow our narrator home. The collection then traces the
rest of his life to his later days when he meets with the
"lady researcher," who collects his stories. Ghost Maps will
acquaint readers with the ghosts never to be forgotten, in a
book that marks the entry of a highly talented new poet. —
from the publisher.
In these "recollected" fragments, stunningly imagined, Erin Noteboom gracefully
transgresses barriers of age, gender, memory, and half a century's murky
complexities. Ghost Maps is something other than a biography: it's an
elevation of the luminously simple images by which humans understand our commonness. —
Marlene Cookshaw
These peoms are the best that language can give us. They startled me to tears. With the
bravery of a
Gwendolyn MacEwen taking on the uneasy life of TE 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 a
blood-warm
imagery, the taste of a story, and a rare, hard-won wisdom. The poet says that we used to
know that
"every opening is a door / for ghosts." Make room for these ghosts because the minute you start
reading this book, they lift off the pages and walk into your world. Forever you'll be haunted
by them and
by the remarkable power of Erin Noteboom's poetry. — Lorna Crozier
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 foxholee 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 terrors of this experience shapes the rest of his life.
You will discover that you have never read poems like these beefore. 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
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In her second collection, Erin Noteboom draws on the Bible to create vivid and thought-provoking poetry. Fearlessly, Noteboom considers the psalms, proverbs,
the traditional stories of the Bible, and other ideas of religion. Always, she writes from the unexpected point-of-view. She writes of Leah’s experience, and
Cain’s — rather than Jacob’s and Abel’s. The psalms contain praise of dishwater, and Noteboom doesn’t hesitate to comment on more extreme forms of religious
conviction. A fascinating and intriguing book. — from the publishere
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What the Critics Say
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