Erin Noteboom: Ghost Maps

During her visits of April through December 1995, Erin Noteboom recorded her conversations with Carl Hruska, an American veteran of WWII. 

The resultant book of poetry, Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska, is part oral history and part journey of imagination.  In places she retells his story through her own verse.  In others, Noteboom lets Hruska’s words stand on their own, unadorned.

Hruska had been a homestead-bound Iowa farmer before the war, so his way of interpreting the many strange new experiences is through the language of horse and plow.  From the deck of a troop transport ship he sees the Atlantic Ocean in terms of a field of wheat, (1) and describes the first negro sailor he meets as having a head a “lambswool head.” (2) In the depth of winter in the Ardennes, he speaks of soldiers asleep, braced against each other “like sheaves of wheat.” (3) Killing his first enemy soldier left him with grisly, ambivalent feelings, like chopping “a black snake with a hoe.” (4)

In this selection, from Waste Noteboom records, with third-person detachment, how Hruska lost his leg.

It happened in an orchard.

*

Lying there, he stares

into the ragged holes that wasps have chewed

in windfall apples – soft

as mud, now, brown

as the hand of frost.  Gone

*

to waste.  By that alone

he might have guessed at mines.  This

hungry country. (5)

The lacing of wispy verse around verbatim accounts reminds the reader of handwork, of embroidery with appliqués. Vivian Hruska’s life of waiting back on the farm -- knitting, doing chores – often appears in the form of letters to her husband overseas. These bits of plainspoken rural news relieve the reader from the grisly wartime narrative, just as they surely formed comfortable daydreams into which Hruska could retreat as he fought his way toward that fateful apple orchard. 

In the end, we readers are left with a compelling story of marriage, of people called out from their normal lives, of countryside at peace and war.

1. Noteboom, Erin. Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska. (Toronto:  Wolsak and Wynn.  2003.) 17.

2. ibid.

3. ibid., 26

4. ibid., 21

5. ibid., 50

For more information about the poetry of war, and other related topics, please scroll down to my posts on  

• History: A Home Movie, 
• The Unraveling Strangeness
• Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune

For poetry that most closely resembles Vivian Hruska’s memories, please visit Kyrie and Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey in the article "The Way-Back Machine."