Anna Couani [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Anna Couani is one of Australia's best exponents of the prose poem. A founding member of the Sydney Women Writers Workshop (also known as the No Regrets Group) in 1978, Couani also established the small press Sea Cruise Books, which published collections by notable Australian poets such as Ken Bolton and Pamela Brown.

In "Map of the World" the extended length of the opening sentences, freed from the interruption of line breaks, creates a slow drift, mirroring the winding of rivers and the smoothness of hills and sand dunes. The sentences are then condensed and the pace of the poem quickens with the use of repetition and slant rhymes—the sentences generate a momentum like relay runners, each handing off the baton to the next. We begin to rush through this map of the world, which expands at the rate of our seeing it, until the closing lines take us off the map and out of the poem. A kind of revelatory distance is created, so that in these lines it is as if the poem is seeing itself in the mirror.

Charles Simic once wrote that the prose poem was "the sole instance we have of squaring the circle." I think "Map of the World" does just that. 

 

The Map of the World

The map of the world is felt from the inside. Rough around the coastlines and smooth
over the hills and sand dunes. Warm and moist through the rivers which lead outside 
to the forests like long hair then sparser like shorter more bristly hair to the touch.
Reading a globe of the world with its topography in relief. Reading with the fingers
as though blind. Feeling it with the back, down the spine. Making contact with the
nipples and the nose only. Moving at a fast rate underwater through the oceans and
large lakes. Most of the oceans connect up with each other. Moving so fast that you 
become aware of the earth's surface being curved. Flying low but fast across the land
masses. Make yourself feel like the world. As old but not as troubled.

 

 

Comments

[Jemmon Foo]

Thank you for this valuable poet. Seems that excitng things are going on in Australian poetry these days.

[Anna Couani]

Small thing - it should read “globe of the world”
Anna Couani