No Known Coordinates by Maria Terrone
No Known Coordinates
by Maria Terrone
The Word Works, 2025
reviewed by Kathleen Kirk,
EIL Poetry Editor
cover art by Frances Coch
I like finding myself in this book, and getting lost there, with No Known Coordinates, by Maria Terrone. It’s a little scary and a lot comforting. Reading, I might disappear into fog, mist, or cloud, like the man in a boat on the cover, or find myself looking, like him, into a spyglass, seeing faraway things up close. In fact, the first section of the book is “One: Disappearing Act,” with moments of sudden silence or blinding light, black-and-white awareness or blur, ambiguous scenes from dream or film, and the perfect yet inexplicable return of memory or ghost.
It’s a book in praise of warblers and pigeons, of clarity and mystery. In part “Two: The Tree’s True Color,” I was touched by the simple and moving poem, “A Girl in Winter,” who is marked within by an indelible “charcoal smudge” of awareness of (I think) death. And I love this couplet from “Under the Hawthorn”:
I hold this truth/untruth to be
self-evident/hidden.
In part “Three: Hidden City,” things are visible and invisible yet again. On the subway, we are “wrapped in our skin-tight sheathes of silence.” In “Flowers Dark & Light” we can literally see a “hidden” structure to the poem: it is two poems, in couplets that alternate between regular font and italics, everything coming together at the end where soot shapes flowers on the windowsill.
In “Four: Her Secrets” we find the tight sonnet of “Handbag,” a poem about a mother’s love. I identify with the tumble and chaos of “The Notebooks,” a prose poem about undated diaries, composition books, and dream journals (?) of the past, life in a jumble of memories and observations. I love the reference to The Golden Notebook, a novel I read, too, about how everything might come together and make sense, make art!
And in “Five: No Known Coordinates,” not all is lost! There is a lovely story of a stranger/neighbor helping in a time a need, an angel or Good Samaritan. Anything is possible, except maybe to know for sure what’s true, to sift evidence from “memories that may be dreams.” The title of the book comes inside a poem called “Message to Google Earth,” about locating oneself at a vulnerable time. And I identify strongly with these lines: “Lately I live like a sleepwalker / but one born under a lucky sign…,” grateful but at sea.
I’m grateful to have read this book, to have read many of Terrone’s poems over the years, and to find her now, with or without Google Earth.
No Known Coordinates at The Word Works
Maria Terrone in Looking for Love at EIL
Leave a Reply