Review of Hayden Saunier’s A Cartography of Home
May 12, 2021
In her new book, A Cartography of Home, Hayden Saunier turns an inquisitive, appraising eye on the landscape around her, along with its human and nonhuman inhabitants. In vivid, concrete language, she investigates the phenomena she encounters, sharing with us a rich and subtle tapestry in which natural and unnatural, past and present, intermingle.
“Cartography” refers to map-making, but the image on the book’s cover turns the idea of conventional way-finding on its head: Cut-up strips of map, along with variously colored pieces of string and other material, intertwine into what might be a bird’s nest. The image is apt—that of human and nature, wildly woven together, as they are in this book.
Saunier introduces us to her 78-page collection with “Kitchen Table,” a poem that heralds many of the book’s themes. The past weighs heavy as she describes a table made of walls “that held /A family of six before typhoid took/Both parents and fostered out the children.” Nature enters the picture, too—a nature negatively affected by humans: “Our table’s made of old growth forests no longer forests.” She concludes with the table’s gritty imperfection—and an invitation:
Our table’s wood
Is spalted through with hard luck, grease,
disease, fat streaks of amber jam.
Our table’s make of all of it.
It’s us and ours. Sit down and eat.
The natural world takes center stage in Cartography. Saunier seems intrinsically tied to it; her poems are full of bodies of water, animals, trees. But nature here is not gentle—and perhaps not trustworthy. In “Cold Morning with New Catastrophes,” Saunier describes walking
To the still-flowing creek,
That may well be poisoned,
or maybe not poisoned, or maybe,
This morning, not yet.
There is harshness in this world, to be sure. Bitterness, too—which, when it comes to “under-ripened, overfed strawberries,” Saunier slices “into smaller bits of bitterness.”
Nonetheless, nature is also capable of offering respite. “Dirt’s/the only thing that’s telling truth today” Saunier’s narrator says as she sinks her hands into the earth in “After the Press Conference.” And even in the case of a creek that pounds and roils after a downpour, Saunier finds “enough to steady me today.”
Uncertainty stirs in these poems; there lurks at times a sense of ominous threat. “Mad fury all around,” declares Saunier in “A Brief Inventory of Now.” She goes on to say, “It’s possible this house/won’t hold … Wind raises its pitch. This could go/either way any moment, and no telling which.”
Part of Saunier’s connection to the natural world is her awareness of death. People who have died populate and inform her poems. She muses about those who have gone before, and the fact that she will follow them. In “Locks,” she contemplates the notion of ghosts having keys, “As though we, the living, are locks.” In “Inhabitant,” she thinks about the person who lived in her dwelling before her. She finds an oriole’s nest with
your hair spun
in swirls for a bed.
As, someday, I know,
so will mine.
The past is alive in these poems; past, present, and future are a continuum. Saunier seems to respect and perhaps accept the transitory nature of life. In “Making Hay,” she refers to “my momentary body.”
As grounded in nature as these poems are, something else is afoot as well, something … otherworldly. In “Forecast,” she says:
Something swift
and slender crosses the path.
Let’s pretend
it’s only animal, not sign.
Saunier often turns a critical gaze on society—subtly, as in her description of pink tags fluttering from “a grandstand full” of condemned trees in “Solo Act.” Or more brazenly in “Confirmation Bias at the Minimarket,” when the narrator and her friend—who’s “behaving/ like a walking example of organic/food privilege”—regard the store’s clerk, with her “eyes dead/ of anything but the lethal stare she sports.”
While Saunier’s narrator usually appears as a solitary character, the poet also writes movingly about human connection. In “Pantomime,” the narrator—alone in a hotel room, watching the moon—mutely communicates with another woman, outside, who’s doing the same: “I jab my finger wildly at the rising moon/and she nods and jabs her finger wildly at it too.” In “Ode to Customer Support,” she declares, “I swear, dear voice, I love you.”
Perhaps most strikingly, though, Saunier reaches out directly to her reader, drawing her into a collaborative journey. She opens “Already” with the lines, “This is not what you thought you would be reading/ and honestly it’s not what I thought I would be writing.” She talks of creating “bread to pass between us” and concludes with finding
A table where we sit down
together, take out our hidden knives, use them to spread
the slices, smooth the sweet jam, share the bread.
Thus, Saunier makes explicit the experience one has in reading this book: that of journeying with her through a process of investigation and discovery, observation and reflection. As the book’s cover perhaps warns us, our trip is not neatly plotted. Rather, it is full of unexpected turns and discoveries. The result is a flavorful and satisfying meal.
Abbey J. Porter writes poetry and memoir about people, relationships, and life struggles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, an MA in liberal studies from Villanova University, and a BA in English from Gettysburg College. Abbey works in communications and lives in Cheltenham, Pa., with her two dogs.