This is a really beautiful collection of poetry. The title really says it all. Reading each poem is like entering a forgotten world- Atlantis, El Dorado. The imagery is really beautiful. Here's a sample:

"Stay with me in the weak sunlight of old empires- that adjacent world where everything, even extinction is still waiting to be invented..."

"If this tango is to last, then tengo que tener prisa"

"There were two of us then, errant Magellans, the sea or its rumor at our backs..."

Mahrer excavates his poetic landscapes with precision and delicacy. The allusions are almost biblical in their allegorical drive. This is a poet who loves the interplay of words but the conceptual tone never occludes the visceral grappling with language. A definite recommendation for poetry lovers, students and teachers.

A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent: Poems by Gregory Mahrer is the Fordham Poets Outloud Winner for 2015. Mahrer's work has been published in The New England Review, The Indiana Review, Green Mountains Review, Volt, Colorado Review, Hayden's Ferry Review and elsewhere, as well as on the websites Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Several of his poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In 2014, one of those poems, "Refrain," received a Puschart Special Mention.

I found this to be a particularly difficult collection for myself. Some parts did catch with me others seemed to be too distant. That may be the purpose of this collection too. The poetry is heavily punctuated with and usually end with ellipses. It gives the sense of incomplete documentation, lost pages and sections of pages. Something that we in the future are looking back on and trying to piece together:

In the unsettled light we made camp and set about perfecting the maps... Within their gilded borders: the world we had left behind only wider at the isthmuses and subject to revision...

There is a feeling of history, exploration, and discovery as man tries to map out new lands.

The collection pulls phrases together that are descriptive and add color and life to the reading. It is also fragmented, like many ancient texts, leaving the reader to insert, interpret, and discover additional meaning. I can fully appreciate Mahrer's effort and direction, however, this collection remains a little out of my range. It happens. A few years ago when Eric Linsker's award winning La Far was published, I was unable to get through it. It took over a year but once I finished it and understood it, it was well worth the effort. This collection requires the same type of effort and will yield the same type of reward.

This book of poetry holds a touch of the magical, the fantastical, and the strange strung together with invisible threads. Certain lines eagerly grabbed for my attention, while many seemed too unattainable. It’s a difficult collection to unravel, even for myself, an avid reader of modern and ancient poetry. The poet’s use of fragmentation and excessive ellipses gave the work an old time feeling. It’s as if parts of the poem had been lost and readers are here to recover the pieces themselves. While it’s a cleaver style to attempt, I’m not sure it was beneficial to the poetry. There is beautiful language galore across the book, but at times it’s difficult to gleam a grander message.

Some of favorites: Drift, Blackout

An ARC for this book was provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.