Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’ fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion … expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.
more
In Philip Metres’ Shrapnel Maps, tradition is poetically deconstructed and a stark lineage of oppression is laid bare. Told in fragmented vignettes, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is observed with somber nuance through a cacophony of voices, the winged shrapnel of the speakers’ words devastating their target on impact. Language, memory, culture, and geography disperse and converge into a deafening crescendo of shared wounds, the despair deeply rooted in the disputed land:
something larger than wave hovers
)
& buoys us in its wake, large as the sun
as it breaks into hills as if coaxed by the singers
)
to hold another’s shoulder or hand off our hands
to another & sway our branches
)
& stamp the dear earth so hard it feels
we are lifting together / its trembling chest
Parsing the wreckage of a region in collapse, the perspectives zoom in on different scenes of physical and immaterial carnage. Scenes play out like shattered mirrors, the reflections divided and snippets splayed in disarray, evoking the onset of confusion in the aftermath of a blast. Here, Arabs travel to Palestine from abroad for a wedding; a bombing is viewed through the lens of a victim, a survivor, a perpetrator, and the families struggling to make sense of the bloodbath; and a father bathes with his child in a shelled-out building after a drone attack. Gingerly merging these threads of annihilation into one universal tapestry of human suffering and depravity, the small moments shared by the disregarded victims footnote a history of ruin:
You see your mouth
before you hear it, wax of the explosion now unplugged
& bleeding ear. Smoke the mouth / the door. Everything now
shaken, the salt of plaster & sliver no time
to make of this anything but the rubble of the human.
& where are you, the one I love, who serves everyone—
That is not your leg. Bloodslick & shatter. Is there nothing,
no clock to wake us from this dream? I’m standing
in someone else’s brain.
My love, I have no mouth.
Recurrent motifs include singing, birds, glass, clocks, the memory of the earth, and the dissociation of the self. Blank spaces, fragmented words, and redaction coalesce, revealing the wordless ripples of intergenerational wounds that plague the oppressed. Mapping a landscape of loss, Metres mines the ore of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, dissecting its conception, consequences, and collateral damage—in doing so, the speakers assemble this quiet discord into linguistic ordnance echoing across generations:
A jellyfish of smoke,
you say aloud, Look!—
the beautiful photo’s
white tentacles and head
swim the sky
before they fall. A privacy
of glass. Ripples
of division. Flesh
from flesh, true god
from true god, made
in the walled
island of forgiven
not unforgotten, dreaming
where the past will lead.
Philip Metres’ Shrapnel Maps stands as an unforgettable testament to the people whose lives have been ravaged by war and the myriad surreptitious ways that trauma winds itself inside the cultural fabric of the generations yet to come. Focalizing the particulate within the collective, the exiled in Shrapnel Maps are re-humanized in a world that seeks to brutalize them, eliciting hope that their decades of anguish may reach a compassionate resolution in our lifetimes.