A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent

This is a really beautiful collection of poetry. The title really says it all. Reading each poem is like entering a forgotten world- Atlantis, El Dorado. The imagery is really beautiful. Here's a sample:

"Stay with me in the weak sunlight of old empires- that adjacent world where everything, even extinction is still waiting to be invented..."

"If this tango is to last, then tengo que tener prisa"

"There were two of us then, errant Magellans, the sea or its rumor at our backs..."

A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent is a beautiful collection of poetry. Each poem takes you into a wonderful world (i.e. Atlantis, El Dorado). I enjoyed the imagery in the poems. They were almost melodic at times, like tiny little songs. These are the kind of poems you can just relax back into your chair and sink into. I loved the poems Red City, Blackout, Refrain, Verge and As in the Letter O. A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent is a lovely collection of poems.

Mahrer excavates his poetic landscapes with precision and delicacy. The allusions are almost biblical in their allegorical drive. This is a poet who loves the interplay of words but the conceptual tone never occludes the visceral grappling with language. A definite recommendation for poetry lovers, students and teachers.

After a long and stressful day I quite often relax the mind with the gentle rhythm of poetry. Last night was no different but, rather than falling into the warm embrace of well known stanzas, I felt I wanted to try something new. This poet and his work weren’t familiar to me but I was intrigued by the title and the concept, so I gave it a go, not knowing quite what to expect.

What I got was a collection in three sections, each section preceded by an abstract artwork in black and white that somehow manages to set the tone and engage the brain to deal with the wonderful imagery, this time in words, that awaits. I say this because these poems are not quick and simple to read but if you love words and the creative and surprising use that they can be put to, you will enjoy these poems. The language is complex, requiring a good vocabulary, and the description is challenging but very rich and highly rewarding, especially if read out loud (even if it’s in your head). To give you a couple of my favourite examples:

With every collapsed perpendicular the fettered world Grows more fragile, an accretion of woollen weather and yellow boots

and

The air must have been thick with insects and smoke: neither breathable nor nameable, a series of black guesses that enters the lungs.

It’s not only the words themselves but the physical layout on the pages that serve to make you consider the poetry. Red City and Whiteout are two such works that almost dot the words around the page, in a similar way to blackout poetry if you know the style, making you search in the gaps and read it in a totally different way than if they were word after word, line after line. This staccato effect, especially in Whiteout, made it sound like fragments of conversations heard in passing as you walked through that street in a snowstorm.

It certainly lives up to its title too as travel we did, from hot desert to deep snow, through streets of unknown cities, fields and forests to great tracts of ocean and the thoughts and words of the traveller that accompanies you, every poem different from the last as you explore the Lost Continent and, in some ways, yourself.

As a final note, if you’re not in the humour for heavy academic interpretation of the poems, ignore the Foreword by John Yau as it manages to look indepth at the language used without bringing anything at all to the poetry itself. But that is one small niggle among a collection of works that I am very glad to have stumbled across and I will travel back through this Provisional Map of the Lost Continent again and maybe lose myself along the way.

A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent: Poems by Gregory Mahrer is the Fordham Poets Outloud Winner for 2015. Mahrer's work has been published in The New England Review, The Indiana Review, Green Mountains Review, Volt, Colorado Review, Hayden's Ferry Review and elsewhere, as well as on the websites Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Several of his poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In 2014, one of those poems, "Refrain," received a Puschart Special Mention.

I found this to be a particularly difficult collection for myself. Some parts did catch with me others seemed to be too distant. That may be the purpose of this collection too. The poetry is heavily punctuated with and usually end with ellipses. It gives the sense of incomplete documentation, lost pages and sections of pages. Something that we in the future are looking back on and trying to piece together:

In the unsettled light we made camp and set about perfecting the maps... Within their gilded borders: the world we had left behind only wider at the isthmuses and subject to revision...

There is a feeling of history, exploration, and discovery as man tries to map out new lands.

The collection pulls phrases together that are descriptive and add color and life to the reading. It is also fragmented, like many ancient texts, leaving the reader to insert, interpret, and discover additional meaning. I can fully appreciate Mahrer's effort and direction, however, this collection remains a little out of my range. It happens. A few years ago when Eric Linsker's award winning La Far was published, I was unable to get through it. It took over a year but once I finished it and understood it, it was well worth the effort. This collection requires the same type of effort and will yield the same type of reward.

This book of poetry holds a touch of the magical, the fantastical, and the strange strung together with invisible threads. Certain lines eagerly grabbed for my attention, while many seemed too unattainable. It’s a difficult collection to unravel, even for myself, an avid reader of modern and ancient poetry. The poet’s use of fragmentation and excessive ellipses gave the work an old time feeling. It’s as if parts of the poem had been lost and readers are here to recover the pieces themselves. While it’s a cleaver style to attempt, I’m not sure it was beneficial to the poetry. There is beautiful language galore across the book, but at times it’s difficult to gleam a grander message.

Some of favorites: Drift, Blackout

An ARC for this book was provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.