What We’re Reading: Bone Map

I grew up in the days of the “Land Before Time” and “My Little Pony.” Every kid in my class had either a rubber dinosaur or plastic pony; we imagined pre-historic landscapes and rolling pastures for our anthropomorphized friends to romp and rally. Somehow, even in adulthood, that equine magic lives on. But I’ve never imagined horses the way they are portrayed in this book of poems. Here they are prehistoric in their perfection, decidedly animal, and the landscapes around them are real with poetic prowess.

Bone Map by Sara Eliza Johnson (Milkweed Editions, 2014)

Bone Map is Sara Eliza Johnson’s debut collection. The book was selected by Martha Collins as a winner of the National Poetry Series 2013 Open Competition. Johnson discusses her thrill and trepidation associated with such an award in this interview with Connotation Press. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Utah.

As with all good books of poems, Bone Map creates a lexicon of image and language; more importantly, however, is that Johnson explores that lexicon to such unrelenting depths, that words like “wolf,” “milk,” and “glisten” may never be the same for her readers. “Märchen” left me shivering long after I’d closed the book. The title is German for “fairy tale” and this poem is a drastic mis-telling of Little Red Riding Hood. It begins:

Lost in the forest one night, we find the body

of a wolf, its throat torn open,

the wound a cupful of rippling

 

black milk, where maggots curl star-white

in their glistening darkness. […]

What Johnson reveals through this poem, and others, is an Old World lore—a place of wish-making and ritual—where we are taken to confront love and grief with magic spells and blood at our disposal for making meaning.

Similarly graphic, “The Last Przwalski’s Horse” is gruesome only in its own acuity. Tenderness underlies anatomical destruction, as the body is dismantled, consumed:

[…]

He unsheathes his knife

and slices the breast-

bone, up the abdomen,

then splits the pelvis, rolls

organs from the opening:

little planets gone soft

with blood. Cuts away

the glistening red web

of matter around the heart

[…]

If there is a mis-step in the work at hand, it may be the occasional eagerness for closure. In “Beekeeping,” the reader lives “At the edge of the valley // wild hyacinths, violet ones,” for most of the poem. Repeated bee stings become a metaphor for love, but the metaphor is made in such a direct way, that it seems to deflate the magical world of all previous stanzas: “This must be / what love is: // a pain so radiant / it cuts through all others.”

My only other question, (and this really is a question for you, dear readers) concerns the use of war as a secondary metaphor for a lovers’ quarrel. In “Deer Rub,” a beautifully executed poem with blood as “berries,” a wartime scene intersects with the primary action of a deer rubbing his antlers after winter.

[…]

The rain scratches at the deer’s coat

 

as if trying to get inside, washes the antlers

of blood, like a curator cleaning the bones

 

of a saint in the crypt beneath a church

and the end of a century, when the people

 

have begun to think of the bodies

as truly dead and unraisable,

 

when children have begun to carry knives

in their pockets. […]

The war diction returns later, just before the poet clinches the poem with a couplet ostensibly iterating the heart of the poem’s matter: “long after this morning / when the country / wakes to another war, // when two people wake in a house / and do not touch each other.” I guess what I’m wondering, is whether drawing such a comparison is completely ethical, given the disproportion between a country at war and a relationship gone cold.

Johnson demonstrates ardent formal consideration in poems like “View From the Fence, On Which I Sit and Dangle My Legs.” Here, horses are fully imagined in the scope of their interiority and physical placement, and the internal rhyme offers formal connection between environment and body. Sonically, the poem pours down the page ending, appropriately, with the line, “to laughter: I will follow you down.”

The collection also includes two intertwined series, one of archipelagos which reimagines the sea-voyage of 11th century Irish disciple St. Brendan, and the other, a series of instructions and letters from an ice field. These poems deal with grief and loss more explicitly than earlier poems in the book and ambitiously weave something epic with a decidedly lyric voice.

Johnson’s work is fanciful, bloody, and deliberate. Bone Map may lose you in a forest, ice field, or the sea, but I can promise  that you’ll be accompanied in those chilly places by a body, if not alive, then still hot and buzzing.