Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Noteboom was planning a novel about the World War II Battle of the Bulge
when she found an old veteran of the U.S. army to interview. As a result
of her many conversations with him, she has written Ghost Maps instead.
It’s a powerful work in many ways, not least because of its context,
the war itself, what happened afterwards, the titular figure’s loss of
a leg just before the end of the war, and how he handled that.

“Carl Hruska” is, in fact, a fictional figure based on the man
Noteboom interviewed, yet even he begs the narrator of these poems,
“Never put my name / on anything, would you, Erin?” His war was like
that of every “decent boy”—tough, terrifying, and full of losses
he may never fully understand but can allude to as he tells his story.

The best aspect of this collection is its forceful understatement. The
poems from the war are short, tight, and taut, their images precise, as
in “The Hand”: “At first glance, he thinks / a glove / a white
three-button dropped / in harrowed mud. It has / that length precisely.
/ There is no blood in it. // Come in, it says, its / emptied
gesture.” The poems set after Carl loses his leg to a mine and returns
from the war deal with his wedding, children, and growing old. Though
they stretch out a bit, Noteboom retains her careful but engaged
distance, allowing the facts, and the man, to speak for themselves.

Ghost Maps enters the language and perceptions of its World War II
setting, and it does a fine job of evoking a time and context long gone.
With a mix of passion and restraint, Noteboom has created a character
whose story will stay with readers.