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A CHANGE OF MAPS
poems by Carolyne Wright
Poetry ISBN-10: 0-9762114-3-2 ISBN-13:
978-0-9762114-3-3
$18.00 US $21.00
CANADA 6 x 9 112 pp
Praise for Carolyne Wright
Winner of the 2007 Independent Publishers Book Awards, Poetry, Bronze award
The Independent Publisher Book Awards were conceived as a broad-based, unaffiliated awards program open to all members of the independent publishing industry. The awards are intended to bring increased recognition to the thousands of exemplary independent, university, and self-published titles produced each year, and reward those who exhibit the courage, innovation, and creativity to bring about change in the world of publishing.
Formally elegant, thematically intelligent,
urgent and thoughtful, A Change of Maps traverses the American
landscape—its primal beauty and human diminishment—and explores
the tensions in the nature of this country, its mix of cultures,
and its losses both national and personal. In these brilliant and
intuitive poems, Carolyne Wright reflects on love and independence,
love and work, choices made in youth and the larger awarenesses
that enable the world and the species to continue.
—Betsy Sholl
The latest poetry collection by award-winning author and poet Carolyne Wright, A Change of Maps,
examines the power of travel, destiny, love and independence, as well as what it means to live in separate worlds
and experience the clash of cultures. The free-verse conveys a bright and fresh approach to the challenges of destiny,
in this lively and boldly enlightening compilation. "The Ice-Climber": A single climber, making his way
/ handhold by handhold over the blue / labial folds of the glacier.
/ A man roped only to himself / under a sky closing down, breaking the first rule of avalanche weather.
/ Never climb on ice alone. // "He's either crazy," you whispered, / "or extremely good." /
Your broken climber's trepidation. / Who else would train / for the North Face of the Eiger?
—The Midwest Book Review
Established in 1976, the Midwest Book Review publishes several monthly publications for community and academic library systems in California, Wisconsin, and the upper Midwest.
Carolyne Wright’s poems adventure with candor and heart—traveling
into the hushed-up Fifties, onto subway platforms, through rain
storms, through early drafts of love and the heart’s sub-zero weather.
Everywhere, Wright sees her native territory with travel-widened
eyes, even when moving across the brown lawns of Mid-America. Here,
Argus and Preacher Bob co-exist, also ghazals and microchips, the
Bronze Age and rusted Westinghouses, the shaman and the xerox machine.
As childhoods wave goodbye, and whole coastlines wander off, Wright
finds pinions in music (it is her job, she says, to mimic the wild
crane’s cry), and in the promise of life unfolding. This poet carries
a passport whose exit visas—like her poems—are a measure of a buoyant
survival.
—Emily Hiestand
Carolyne Wright explores in poetry what it means to live in different
worlds, and probes with great sensitivity what it means to live
in two or more different worlds at the same time . . . Wright writes
with passion, eloquence, and clear moral perspective.
—Andrew Hudgins
This book is Wright's tribute to Elizabeth Bishop, beginning with a double abecedarian—rhymed couplets for each letter—on being Bishop's pupil. Wright re-travels her mentor's concerns and themes re: geographic space and personal/historical time. A sestina dedicated to Bishop's memory muses on travel: modern tourism and medieval Crusades—"Someday these cities may be nothing but hotels." Like Bishop's, these poems are exquisite in form, insightful in theme. As many say of Bishop, Carolyne Wright is indeed "a poet's poet."
—Vince Gotera,
North American Review, Jan-Feb 2006
Carolyne
Wright has published eight books and chapbooks of poetry, a collection
of essays, and three volumes of poetry translated from Bengali and
Spanish. Her previous collection, Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire
(Eastern Washington University Press/Lynx House Books), won the
Blue Lynx Prize and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus
Foundation. Wright’s investigative memoir of her experiences
in Chile on a Fulbright Study Grant during the presidency of Salvador
Allende, The Road to Isla Negra, received the PEN/Jerard
Fund Award and the Crossing Boundaries Award from International
Quarterly. Wright spent four years on Indo-U.S. Subcommission and
Fulbright Senior Research fellowships in Calcutta and Dhaka, Bangladesh,
collecting and translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers
for an anthology in progress, A Bouquet of Roses on the Burning
Ground, which received a Witter Bynner Foundation Grant and
an NEA Fellowship in Translation, as well as a Fellowship from the
Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. A graduate of Seattle University’s
Humanities Honors Program with masters and doctorate in English
and Creative Writing from Syracuse University, Wright has received
awards from the Poetry Society of America, Seattle Arts Commission,
and the New York State Council on the Arts, and she has been a Writing
Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio
Center, and Yaddo. A visiting professor at colleges, universities
and writers’ conferences throughout the U.S., Wright has returned
to her native Seattle, where she serves on the faculty of the Whidbey
Writers Workshop MFA Program, and on the Board of Directors of the
Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).
Last Dream in Peru
Lake Titicaca
It was my job
to mimic the crane’s cry
as my friends and I skiffed
through the estuary reeds.
But how could I, unless my life
beat in the heart of the bird
and looked through his eye?
My own name was all
I could call.
As they rowed, my friends told me
how, under the floors of their cabins,
they’d excavated old stone walls
whose joints were still
as mortarless and smooth as faces
without memories or dreams.
All I meant to say went quiet.
Real cranes cried
above the thin wind.
It was time to turn back
to land. Before we reached
the shore, I’d have to find
an opening in the water
that fit my speech,
and whisper my name in it
before the lake closed over
and sank it like a stone.
Another Look at “Albion on the Rock”:
Plate 38 of Blake’s Milton
“Turn away no more;
“Why wilt thou turn away?
“The starry floor,
“The wat’ry shore,
“Is giv’n thee till the break of day.”
—William Blake, Songs of Experience |
The naked lovers sprawl on a “wat’ry shore.”
His right hand fingers, absently, the sea
slapping at its tidal mark. His left hand
keeps moving over her thigh. Why? His love
has swelled and ebbed, he turns his head away.
So close they could almost touch it above their bed
An eagle swoops . . . Once I lay in your king-sized bed,
embracing you like that woman on the shore.
I’d thrown caution, like a no-deposit can, away,
and chattered on about the all-surrounding sea
as the poets’ emblem of unfettered love.
You turned over, yawning into your hand.
“What do you see in the lifelines on your hand?”
I asked. “Nothing about you,” you said. Our bed,
it seems, a momentary lapse—an excuse for love
we’d dropped between us like a net, to shore
up our sands from dissolving in an alien sea
before some reclamation bureau dredged the tide away.
Since then I’ve moved time and tidal zones away
and you’re the developer on TV whose hand
sweeps back to reveal the view lots by the sea,
the blueprints scattered on some happy couple’s bed.
You know the cost of each square inch of shore,
call a good investment “Your finest act of love.”
What was I but an early draft of love?
Your contractors changed the woman, hauled away
birdlife, trees—all but the cost-effective shore.
I’ve owned up to the deeds passing through my hands,
detain no wheeler-dealers in my bed
and sign all petitions to preserve the sea.
No engraving saves or replicates the sea—
the etching crude, ink gouaches gauche as love
between True Confession’s covers. One printer’s bed
laid wrong upsets the whole edition. Ages away,
Blake, hell-bent, shook his stylus hand
at heaven. I X-out houses on protected shores.
The poet cried, “Turn away no more!” The sea
falls and rises again in its bed between shores,
and love is our wealth. It holds nothing in its hands.
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