Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska

By: Erin Noteboom

September 2003
96 pages | ISBN 0-919897-90-8
$15.00

**Winner of the CBC Literary Competition**
**Winner of the Acorn-Plantos Award**

These poems 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 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 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 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

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.

The Deep

We used to know this:
every opening is a door
for ghosts. Even a yawn’s
not innocent. A wound
breaks the body’s gates
open. What enters?
Weather wisdom. Phantom
voices. Sadness. Gentleness.
The smell of apples.

Why do they say a leg
is lost? We know
what happened.

A ship burial:
the splash, the kiss
of salt, the pale light
going slowly out,
the weighted canvas
blossoming open, amputated
legs and hands rocking free –

soft green lights
in the deep
and changing sea.

Reviews

• Bible and Battle (James S. Torrens, American Magazine, 10/17/2005)
• Review (University of Toronto Quarterly, 74, 12/1/2004)
• Review (G.S. McCormick, Plum Ruby Book Review, 2/1/2004)
• Review (Robert Reid, The Record, 11/8/2003)

Other Titles by Erin Noteboom

• The Mongoose Diaries: Excerpts from a mother's first year (2007)
• Seal up the thunder (2005)