Human Cartography

Winner of the 2002 T. S. Eliot Prize

Until recently, the halls of science and the halls of literature were kept apart by mutual misunderstanding, and their professors and practitioners stayed in their separate disciplines and only glared at each other now and then through shut windows. But lately, poems such as those in Human Cartography are helping to bridge the language gap.
           James Gurley seems at home at both ends of that metaphorical campus, using the wonderfully sensitive measuring instruments of both to examine both, even being one of those instruments himself, vividly observant, poised there at any number of mysterious thresholds, always aware of what he calls “the relentless beauty of the world.”
          With an easy shift of identities, Gurley gives us dramatic dialogues of obscure or well-known voices—naturalists, ornithologists, nutritionists, photographers, painters—convincing demonstrations of the best kind of literary empathy. In “The Theory of Transformations” he speaks simultaneously as a lover and an anatomy instructor over the wonders of the human body with a beautifully controlled consistency and originality, yet at the same time manages to keep “a beginner’s faith in things unseen.”

Its range of interest, its penetration of normal surfaces and limitations, its mature emotional balance make Human Cartography a very strong first book.

James Gurley’s Human Cartography is, without question, one of the finest, most accomplished books of the year. Rarely do you find a volume in which the eclectic and ecstatic collide in such beautiful and brilliant ways. With their many amazingly unpredictable turns and intersections, these poems display a remarkable lyric gift that will startle, illuminate and, finally, return the world to an enduring unclouded wonder.

—Robert Hedin

Acknowledgments

The Beauty of Physics
    Weighing the Planets
    Biophilia
    A Temporal Bestiary
    The Nature of Colors
    The Radius of Metaphor
    73 Octaves of Nature
    The Beauty of Physics
    West of New England
    Chemical Romance of the Leaf
    The Temple of Science

Household Trust
    An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump
    Night Moths in the Open Fields
    Watcher at the Nest
    Helen Keller on the Vaudeville Circuit
    Household Trust
    The Red Shawl
    The Impossible Task of Ivan Pavlov
    Summer Journey Down the Delaware
    William Carlos Williams Visits Mesa Verde
    Out Walking
    The Life of Objects
    The Theory of Transformation
    Voyage of the Lucky Dragon


The World, or Instability
    Variation on a Theme by Kandinsky
    Madame Blanchard Takes to the Air
    Concealing Coloration
    Tableaux Vivant
    Lady Franklin’s Lament
    The World, or Instability
    Nabokov’s Butterflies
    Field Guide
    Biosophy, an Optimist’s Manifesto
    Music for the Gods
    Five Variations: Seattle

Notes

About the Author

James Gurley has published two poetry chapbooks, Radiant Measures, and Transformations. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, and he is the recipient of various writing grants, most recently a 2001 literary fellowship from Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission.