Maps

In his debut collection, critic and editor Freeman (How to Read a Novelist) juxtaposes locales of international significance and personal remembrance in 48 minor-key snapshots that reflect his engagement with photography. The effect is that of psychological travelogue, offering layered exposures of time and place: “My father’s father rode the rails/ west into Grass Valley and buried three children/ in the shadow of a tree that spread its arms around his bakery.” Unfussy rhetoric and internal rhyme provide sturdy scaffolding as Freeman captures “stingrays black as bats” and “crutches leaned against/ the wall like rifles” with startling accuracy. Freeman largely adopts a journalistic stance, but he also delivers raw confession: “I’d stand there helpless before so much love, unable to do anything useful except/ to watch how serious it gets.” Melancholy notes accompany visual details to lend emotional resonance. “How you would have loved this,” he writes, “the waiter/ sweating his knit shirt dark.” A bit of Robert Hayden lingers in evocations of post-Depression heritage: “Wife dead, every morning/ he woke to the bread and chill, horses/ snuffling in the dark.” Freeman’s “I” operates with a sense of the collective; when he observes “hotels/ in bluish light,/ squares of ice,” readers need never have visited Oslo to agree “I’ve been here/ before” and feel less alone. [em](Nov.) [/em]