Ann Fisher-Wirth’s Carta Marina is an unusual poem in that it presents a vivid picture of a year the narrator spent in Sweden while at the same time recounting and brooding over a love lost in the past.  The poem is based on a copy of a map by the same name as the poem.

The reader is presented with vignettes of places found on this map.  These are places that inspire wonder and delight, but the narrator can quickly drum up memories of her lover who left her long ago.  This juxtaposition of love and beauty with pain and suffering causes the reader some pause, but then he begins to see and accept it as the state of the mind of the narrator at this point in her life.  The part of the poem about the narrator’s stillborn daughter elicits a great deal of sympathy for the narrator.

Despite the pain the reader is exposed to, he is presented with any number of scenes of beauty and love.