In a Landscape

September 15, 2014
Poet Gallaher (Map of the Folded World) chronicles the questions, profundities, and crises of midlife, marriage, and fatherhood in a long poem divided into 71 sections and employing long, loose conversational lines that read much like prose. The collection functions as an extended monologue of varied pitch and range in which the speaker is less concerned with results and technical prowess than the process of speaking (and living) itself. The book opens by asking “ ‘Are you happy?’ That’s a good place to start.” Gallaher’s charm and wit, and the project’s breadth, will woo readers, despite his deterministic worldview and flat tone: “Improving our circumstances had been a stalled idea/ for some time now. I grew up in the era of domes/ and visions and the imminent arrival of/ a new world, and instead we got the 1980s.” Childhood stories (from the time of Gallaher’s adoption and adolescence), provide a backbone for the poem, and round out a history of adversity, uncertainty, and ever-shifting identity: “When did I become what I’ve become, then, as it always seems/ nothing’s changing?” As Gallaher argues, “cataloging one’s life is a sort of other-living,” and “all of us are having different/ experiences right now.”