Map of the Lost

by Miriam Sagan

Centered in northern New Mexico, this collection of poetry describes a series of journeys that create maps of place and memory. The poems travel south to deserts both mythical and real, east to childhood and the past, west to the Pacific and notions of Buddhism, and north to Alaska and a cold transcendence. Each section concludes with a return home where reflection charts locations and people lost to everything from the passage of time to urban renewal.

Genres: Poetry

152 pages, Hardcover

First published April 16, 2008

About the author

Miriam Sagan founded the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. She is author of twenty-five books, including her first novel, Coastal Lives, and her memoir Searching for a Mustard Seed: A Young Widow's Unconventional Story, which won Best Memoir of the Year from Independent Publishers Association.

She won the New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award in Poetry, and has received the Santa Fe Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Reviews

[Shin Yu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Miriam Sagan’s most recent poetry collection, Map of the Lost, traces the migratory history of the poet, while meditating upon what is irrecoverable. The poems explore various expressions of loss encompassing disassociation of childhood, youth, and memory, to a larger contemplation of how history and culture are forgotten. Composed of eighty-seven poems divided into four sections, the strongest poems in Map of the Lost are rooted in the landscape and histories of the Southwest where Sagan has made her home for over twenty years. And though the poet gives herself away as a stranger in “City of Sacred Faith,” the narrator gradually transforms from outsider to insider by living in the same place long enough to register change. Sagan documents urban development and the upscaling of retail businesses in the Plaza, pollution in her neighborhood, the rise of homelessness, forests decimated by fire, “pointing to what has sprung up/what has been torn down.” (5)

One of the strongest themes throughout Sagan’s book is the poet’s engagement with the mother-daughter relationship. In poems like “Demeter in Winter” and “Kore,” Sagan traces her shifting relationship to the feminine. Once a “wild, heedless” Persephone, the poet becomes Demeter to her teenage daughter who threatens the mother-daughter bond with her awakening sexuality. Sagan’s biographical poems of her own life as a young woman, provide an interesting counterpoint to her poems on mothering, with poems like “Diana Doll” and “Séance” expressing a deeper sense of self-reflection and initiation through a contemplation of the loss of girlhood innocence.

Ekphrastic responses to visual artists are scattered throughout the collection; largely descriptive and occasional poems upon the work of Shirin Neshat, Robert Rauschenberg, Morris Louis, Jennifer Bartlett, and lesser-known luminaries such as Santa-Fe based installation artist Erika Wanenmacher. The more interesting of Sagan’s ekphrastic texts are pieces like “Jizo Statue, Art Institute” and “Miniature Rooms,” two poems about visits to the Art Institute of Chicago which engage the poet’s memory. Also compelling are Sagan’s explorations into the lives of female artists like outsider Czech artist Anna Zemankova, Rebecca Salsbury James – ex-wife to Paul Strand and a close associate of Georgia O’Keefe, and performance artist and murder victim Ana Mendieta – former wife of Carl Andre.

The richest poems in Map of the Lost are the texts that attempt to recover a missing history, a private narrative, or individual truth. In “Clovis,” the first human inhabitants of the New World are alluded to through archaeological evidence left behind. Within the text, Sagan calls attention to the interrupted narrative of the Clovis people, by interrupting the poem itself, questioning what destroyed and eradicated the narrative. “Diner” documents the life of a restaurant that is the site of a murder precipitated by a lover’s quarrel. Dramatic enough on its own, the diner is only one small stop along the Santa Fe Trail to the Ludlow Massacre site where memorial statues have been vandalized and relegated to “headless miners/ and everything lost in the story.” (78)

Sagan resists the “sense of souvenir” throughout her mapping of history, which is perhaps best executed in “Mission.” Tracing the background of San Francisco’s Mission Dolores, the poet comments upon how “California schoolchildren/ Must build models of / In cardboard, or with sugar cubes” (111) an urban monument with a legacy of spiritual and cultural subjugation. Drawing parallels to the cultural legacy of the church (San Esteban del Rey) at Acoma Pueblo/Sky City, New Mexico, the poet is haunted by the “desire for what is lost.” It is this recurring theme of loss in Sagan’s collection that ties together the poems in Map of the Lost to form a cohesive and compelling body of work.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always enjoyed Miriam's style of writing and this book of poetry did not disappoint.