Book Review: Color All Maps New

Nicole Herrero

Color All Maps New by Jack Bedell, Mercer University Press, 2021

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

At one point the speaker of the poems in Jack Bedell’s deftly crafted and luminescent poetry collection, Color All Maps New, wonders about leaving his home of Louisiana and holing up in a clean, broken mountain range, as if to escape the primordial swampland. For the purposes of this review, let’s assume the speaker is Jack himself — a dangerous assumption — and that he has made his way across the country and is now sitting here with me, where I live, at the base of high and relatively dry mountains. I want to ask Jack a few questions about his poetry, though I’m not sure I want him to answer other than what he’s already left on the page. I’d say, dude, how does it feel to have history and landscape constantly overwhelm you? Is it an inescapable feeling, tinged with dread? Or do you surrender yourself to your own perceptions, find joy in the sudden buoyancy of words? It’s apparent there is joy in how you choose words. And your lines, they dance across the page. They have kinetic energy.

Of course Jack remains silent as we hike towards a mountain lake together. The lake is clear and blue, granite-bedded. I recall these lines from “Mestayer:” “this light is fading / but is not less.” How is that, Jack? I ask. How have you summoned faith in the fading light? To approach some inkling of an answer, we talk about other poems, about the “densities of family, / and of time,” about entropy, floodwaters, catfish, snakes, bayou birds, and the million other things folkloring his home state and his dreams and his poetry. Forces beyond our control are pulling these densities apart, like these mountains stretched long and high, yet you remain faithful to life, Jack? How? In “Lines for a 13-year-old Todd Marinovich,” you say “even the eagle of your father’s / memory will flutter and fall to ground.” It’s a remarkably sad image. But then I remember how you love your own children, not to mention your chickens. You write about them with such tenderness. But there is also silence between the words, not quite the coldness of detached observation but something like…wisdom…a quiet vigil? Your art is spare with this feeling, not frilly in the least. Your lines strike the mind’s eye like strings of jewels. How have you made crystal from the mud of fear?

Of course Jack is ignoring me at this point, staring at the lake. I imagine he’s beginning to miss his home, his family. He studies the water because he knows “water / will color all maps new.”

We are the ghosts of our fathers hiking down the mountain, saying farewell, making new maps in our minds as we constantly adapt to new terrain. I ask him one more question: what do you love most?

“And the question / just hangs there in the sweet air.”