“Write me a poem/called a map of the winds,” asks Mark Statman’s son. Knowing he can’t, Statman writes one instead about father and son, about belief and Brooklyn. In this new poetry collection, Statman investigates what it means to look at the world, to live in the world, and to wonder about it in ways that are at once speculative and specific. Whether traveling (England, South America, Italy, across the United States) or being at home, this practice of looking closely and imagining, translates into poems that are spare and descriptive (“concentrated and bare as any poetry,” writes David Shapiro). At once direct and elusive, these poems show how the closer Statman gets to understanding what he sees, what results is the realization that he has not seen enough, perhaps not at all, yielding another investigation, another series of imperative questions.
A Map of the Winds is a lovely book, filled with moments of ordinary perception given uncommon attention. Sung through a register of gentle if unrelenting consciousness on the part of the poet that the present is always inexhaustibly on the move, Statman's spare, concise, searching poems channel notations of experience through the visual and aural senses to frame and extend "voice that stands for voice / captures what I want and need / not resemblance". That necessary sense of voicing-as-one-goes in order to handle uncertainty as a point of thematic variation finds its ground in an expansive set of locations: Brooklyn, Mexico, Colombia, the Catskill Mountains. And always at once the recognition and curiosity of "language again giving him / a place for the world".
--Anselm Berrigan
How delightfully apt that A Map of the Winds is "a gift" from Mark Statman's son, or is it Statman's gift to his son? Such are the riddles tenderly offered us in this book, koans with duende that befit the international scope of a consummate poet-translator. His voice brings together historical awareness with mindful surrender to the present moment (that sometime calls back memories from the psyche's depths). Whether the observer is with his wife or son, bird-watching in a cottage, or on the streets of Brooklyn or Bogota, Mark Statman's lines are maps of the wind that carry us into wonder and love.
--Aliki Barnstone
Mark Statman is a poet who has mastered the difficult craft of transparency -- you look through his poems into the world, a world sometimes luminous, sometimes dark, but always accompanied with a sense of astonishment and grace. Statman's voice is a kind of spare lyricism that reminds me of the ancient Greek poets of the Anthology or the concise voicings of Antonio Machado. There are no flourishes or frills to this kind of writing, no gilding or ornamentation:
