Reviewed by Natalie Marino

In Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems, Susan Rich combines her talent at writing lyric poetry with the acknowledgement that the external world matters, that politics matter. The tone and imagery of her poetry reflect her optimism about the world and her keen observations during travel to various parts of the world, e.g. Gaza, Niger, and South Africa. Rich shows us that journeys and poems do not always follow a linear narrative, while making a clear connection between politics and everyday life.

Caravan of Doves is the first section of the collection and is comprised of new poems. The title poem of this first section is "Every Clock is Made of Foxes," and the combination of metaphor and assonance in the title itself draws the reader in. We learn in the beginning of the poem that the speaker is suffering from insomnia in a place she has traveled to. The speaker describes her worries over whether she will be alert enough to learn what she needs to in a computer class the next day:

At midnight, the harvest moon bothers my sleep
and I wake early for my class in Java and Swift

The speaker's surrounding environment is getting in the way of her being able to do what she believes she came there to do.  Later in the poem we learn that the speaker also laments the loss of time:

The mother fox warns of a cyber-attack,
calling me in a secret name known

only to the Idaho potatoes, which look out
of so many eyes they become academics.

The clock drops minutes and cries after them,
the calendar tears a page from the ocean:

Reward for Lost Time

The uses of personification (e.g. "the clock drops minutes and cries after them") and concrete imagery (e.g. "Idaho potatoes") effectively involve the reader in the speaker's environment.  The speaker also seems to be saying that the natural environment is showing her that she is wasting her limited time being so focused on banal tasks. She shows the reader that she is listening with the ending line of the poem, "I must change my life."

The second section of the collection, The Cartographer's Tongue, contains previously published poems. In the poem "Nomadic," the speaker describes her travel to the Republic of Niger and the intimacy she has developed with her friend Aisha:

We invent common words between us,
point at the refrigerator door,
the photograph of ferns rising out of snow
the last volunteer left behind.
I'd like to trade with her
my typewriter keys
for the way she navigates the desert reads the coordinates of sand.
I want to know as Aisha knows
when it's time to follow
the ambivalent line of landscape
keep faith in dunes that disappear

The line "We invent common words between us" implies that communication can be hard when the speaker is traveling to places where languages other than English are spoken. Does this line also imply that communication in writing, and especially in poetry, is also difficult, in that it does not always offer a linear narrative that is easy to understand? It is not entirely clear whether the speaker believes that accessibility in poetry is always her goal when she says, "I want to know as Aisha knows / when it's time to follow / the ambivalent line of landscape." Perhaps the speaker has learned that the most profound meaning in both lyric and in real life is found in ambiguity.

The last poem of the collection is "The World to Come," which addresses the big topics of whether true happiness can be attained, the meaning of life, and the inevitability of death:

Let's say we make our own happiness, roll over in the fields,
stain our arms and legs with blue

grass; let's say there's simply one year left
to draw lists of clouds, slip guilt-free through bars

of chocolate, hold each other in this black hole
of restlessness. This life.

Tonight we will battle the linoleum squares,
laundry stairs, glass deck where one day
the body is sure to grab its last hungry breath.

This poem starts out suggesting that happiness is attainable if we make it ourselves, but the lines "stain our arms and legs with blue / grass" seem to make this suggestion ironic, because where in the world is grass actually the color blue? The speaker makes plain that the monotony of life, and eventual death, is attainable for everybody, especially in these lines: "Tonight we will battle the linoleum squares, / laundry stairs, glass deck where one day // the body is sure to grab its last hungry breath." The poem is not completely pessimistic, however; the line "hold each other in this black hole / of restlessness" asserts that intimacy between human beings is what "this life" is about. The speaker ends the poem implying that failure is a kind of success in that it is evidence of actually being alive, both in poetry and travel. She notes, "Who says we can't find another way / to fail, to come up short, to catch and release."

Susan Rich is both a gifted poet and a human rights activist. What is most striking in her latest collection of poetry is how she deftly combines the necessary inwardness of poetry with the external realities of the world. This gives her poems the beauty of mystery, while also providing her readers with concrete details of real life.