A little Ghost Maps review

Just learned that Ghost Maps made Jeff Donaldson's review poetry books published in 2003, recently out in the University of Toronto Quarterly. The relevant paragraph:

Erin Noteboom's Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska recounts the arc of a soldier's career and a man's life (the title didn't seem right for the book, somehow). Recounted from actual interviews with Hruska before he died, the poems lead us down and then up again, into and out of winter foxholes and Hruska's other experiences in the Second World War, then to civilian life with its garden imagery of weddings and apple orchards. The story works because it is trained with such intimate focus on Hruska's mundane observations, stray thoughts, random or sudden impressions recollected. I occasionally had the feeling that the poet's self-conscious verbal handling obstructs the soldier's first-hand impressions, though just as often their four eyes see as two. This is not especially intense lyric, but very deft, particular, evocative, sound. Noteboom shows a genuine literary gift in a wily echo of Robert Frost's 'After Apple Picking': 'Off the ladder, he stumbles - apples spill / from the heaped peck basket / and thud soft down. He stoops to them: / perfect galas, heavy and blush dappled ... They're for the cider bin.' Frost's poem stands us on a ladder in the middle distance between upward dream visions and downward death. Noteboom has Hruska fall and then get up again. We take her point. In the end, she succeeds in turning an abstract soldier's history into the history of an ordinary man who was once an ordinary soldier, both of them with their wounds and victories.

Hmmm.... I guess I'd call that mixed, mostly good. Nice at this stage to get a review of any kind.

Regarding "After Apple Picking": that was clever of me, wasn't it? I'm always surprised, usually pleasantly, by this sort of explication. It makes me feel as if the poems have their own life, when people see things in them I didn't expect.

On the other hand, I think it says something that the reviewer here chose to focus on the most academic, literary, formally structured, allusion-driven poem in the book ... though I don't know what exactly that something is. Possibly that he and I are in different orbits, and "Picking" is our perigee, our nearest approach.