Cartography of Water by Mike Burwell

Fine Print: I have moved across town and all my Alaska books are in some box I have yet to find. Luckily, Mike Burwell sent me a copy of “Cartography of Water.” Yeah! Someone has heard of my blog.

What I’m reading now: Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose

For a portrait of pain, one might find Alaska an ideal setting. The high rate of suicide would not surprise all those I left in Southern California, who only know of cold and darkness in this northern place, but the careful poet eye and heart finds more, finds all the metaphors and questions about loss that they need, and finds beauty in the survival, in the green shoots of spring, in “bugs ripening” and a broken branch beside the trail.

“Cartography of Water” by Mike Burwell and published by a new press created by poet Anne Coray spans several decades of writing and includes poems previously featured in his chapbooks. The subject matter ranges from the poet’s arrival in Alaska to his complicated relationship with his son. Burwell received his MFA in poetry from University of Alaska Anchorage. He has been a guide and climber in the Alaska Range and Wrangell-St. Elias and teaches poetry workshops at UAA. He also writes environmental impact statements for the U.S. Department of Interior, researches shipwrecks and studies anthropology.

This book is poetry you can read on your lunch break with coworkers chatting around you and trying not to spill their cup of soup on your head, but be careful because you will soon tune out their conversations about the amount of sugar in certain drinks and the latest actions of the pope. You may forget you are under halogen lights altogether and breathe slowly, as if you were sipping fresh brewed tea, while the poem draws you in and pries you open.

The poems are full of Alaska details that miss the tour guides—Quonset hut, tangerines that arrive on frosted crates. Burwell captures experiences universal to many Alaskans (“April, and still / no sign of spring”) and takes the “wet winter road” to a sadness battling all humanity. We also hear about the more scenic Alaska of bears, birches and borealis, though even then there might be an unexpected insight. After a climb, he notes “All that work / and no epiphany, no transformation.”

A calculated pace creates elegant verses and stanzas. Sometimes the careful pauses make the rhythm so appealing that the words themselves and their collective meaning are almost, almost secondary. When the precision lapses (as it rarely does), it makes the roughness all the more apparent. Some of the poems are lists that don’t intrigue or capture me, but that’s the beauty of poetry books—Skip that one, read others three times in a row.

“Cartography of Water” comes with an audio CD which includes a discussion with Burwell and Coray and reading of seven poems. The interview brings up his past, son, the title and writing poetry. It is a nice recap of the book and gives new insights into the poems. You can attend a short reading in your comfy pants and blow your nose all you want without disturbing anybody.

Here is a sample of the phrases that reminded me why I love poetry so much and how it is so enriching to enjoy the landscape of language and images:

“All day / I knew the spruce were bigger / than my only good thought” (The Right Place in Oregon)

“perfect and alert darkness” (Morning Prayer to Water)

“I touch the cool waist / of the planet” (Dream Island)

“In June with the sun coming down like a bronze mallet” (Summer on the Out Island)

“We sat with men so serious with drink / they made women enter through separate doors” (The Lake at Northway)

“This is the world / I need, each day, / to plunge into” (In the Middle of Winter / the Water Taxi Leaves the Dock at Jakolof Bay)

“Without medicine, your mind can’t hold / the world for long, a scar redraping itself” (Picture at Swan Lake)

Birds I looked up in Sibley’s: merganser and yellowlegs

Side note 1: The Anchorage Daily News asked me, as an arts reviewer, to write what I liked and disliked about arts in 2007 and what I was looking forward to in 2008. For my dislike, I wrote that I disliked that the Daily News reduced then eliminated the book section. They edited that sentence out.

Side note 2: I have Alaska Book Report bookmarks. Soon to be the must-have reading accessory.

Side note 3 (I really need to visit this blog more often so that I don’t need to bulge a post with everything): Radical Arts for Women is sponsoring a short story contest open to all women in Alaska. For more information, visit www.radicalartsforwomen.org. Deadline is Feb. 1.

(NorthShore Press, $16, 78 pages)