Many and varied is the loveliness
in the poems of Maria M. Benet's Mapmaker of Absences (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2004; $15.00). There is richness of language, snap of line-break, rightness of image, clarity of feeling, toughness of wisdom. One wouldn't guess that these are the work of a woman who came to poetry from Romania, then Hungary, then Canada, before she settled into California; one wouldn't guess that English is not her first language: there is such a fineness of tone, such an exactness of expression, such a naturalness here.
Memory, Benet tells us in "Ghazal," is the mapmaker of absences. How the poet is attracted to the darkness of loss: not because she comes from Transylvania, not because her soul is more morose than ours, but because life is as much about what we have left behind as about what we have; and Benet knows it. And memory brings such loss before us. Uprooted from the place of one's birth, one must find a place to call home. Seeing your father slide towards death over the course of your teenage years, sadness becomes an essential component of your emotional make-up.
I would also argue, I think, that the subtext of these poems suggests it is not memory, but the poet, who is the true mapmaker of absences; and not only this poet, but all of us who would write of what the heart dares speak.
Memory provides the stuff the map is made of, to be sure, but it is the poet who gives us a record of the journey, who sets down what has been lost. What we understand, we understand from the poet's vantage. She selects what she will examine, we will see; she chooses the language she will use to report what she finds. She is the intelligence of the mapmaking.
Now, to be clear, I recognize that not everything in these poems is necessarily autobiographical; I acknowledge that the poet can pick up and put down a variety of masks at will – I do the same myself; and I understand that one can speak of herself in the third person or, conversely, can speak of someone else in the first person. Yet there is a wholeness to the voicing of these poems which makes me comfortable using a shorthand that refers to "the poet" when in fact it may or may not be the poet who is "speaking" to us. Ultimately, behind these poems there is a singular intelligence, whatever we call her. I call her Benet or "the poet."
Richness of language? How often do we hear the assonance of the long "E"/long "U" sounds found in this stanza from "A Natural Argument" – scene, these, deep, be, sweetest; blue, true, roots, fruit:
So now this: my postulating garden scene,
these steps and a bare suggestion
of figs ripened into the deep blue substance
of hope. Could this be true –
that only a strict confinement of roots
yields the sweetest fruit?
And again, in the same stanza, we hear "S" piling upon "S," starting with "so" and landing on "sweetest:" So, this, postulating, scene, steps, suggestion, figs, substance, this, strict, sweetest. Sweet.
Continued at MAPMAKER - 2, below
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