Philip Metre's Shrapnel Maps

“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 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.” (Copper Canyon)

Themes and Images

Some of the major and minor themes of the book include:

• Trees, fruit, and herbs

• Courts, police, patrol, law, checkpoints, legality, legal language, and prisons

• Holy books

• Houses and neighbors

• Detonation, shrapnel, firearms, and explosives

• Peace and war

• Clothes, hats, and kippas

• Family, lineage, ancestors, and inheritance

• Witness

• Roads/no roads

• Fire

• Walls

• Languages

• Maps

• Birds, wings, and flight

• Water

• Documents and marginalia

• Commercialism, tourism, and media

• Scarcity

• Wind

The major themes that were consistent throughout the entirety of the book are depicted in the map above.

Forms

Polyvocality and Palimpsests

With "Three Books," readers experience the first of many poems in the book that is meant to be read aloud by several speakers, as indicated by "Readers of columns one and three can repeat every line as they descend the page" (7). This form is repeated again in the first poem of "Returning to Jaffa," which is split into four columns, "to be read by four people simultaneously." These columns can be seen as presenting four throughlines for the section: "Guidebook" shows the banalizing power of commerce and tour-guide language; "Haganah Leaflet" suggests war and patrols, and comes from a document that may explain what happened to make the inhabitants of Jaffa leave; "Wafa/Joppa/Jaffa/Yafo" treats destruction more directly; and "Nahida" seems to come from Nahida's mouth, her recollections of that destruction and what it means. Together the threads and opening suggest that few documents are merely "lost," but institutions bury or simply look away from our violent past.

“‘Theater of Operations’ is composed of monologue sonnets dramatizing a fictional suicide bombing. During the Second Intifada, 2000-2005, scores of suicide attacks wreaked terrible devastation, not only hundreds of Israeli lives lost but also the psychological trauma and distrust the attacks induced. At the same time, thousands of Palestinians also lost their lives resisting the occupation. ‘Theater’ relies on language borrowed from news reports, comment threads, oral testimony, interviews, literatures, and letters.” (160)

Erasures

The first erasure poem of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad appears on page 8. In an interview, Metres asserts his belief that the text and Twain himself were aware of the problems of representation and how documents like this, as well as travel posters, are already themselves erasures (Between the Covers). The first erasure serves too as an artist statement for Metres' aims within the book: "Ark in a vastly different home. I can see easily I must unlearn a great many things about Palestine. I must begin a system of reduction out of so large a history." The second erasure of Mark Twain: “The Innocents Abroad they entered the country with their verdicts already prepared, They have shown pictures and rhapsodies, and see with the author’s eyes instead of their own, and speak with his tongue. lay their weary heads upon dim eyes” (41). The third erasure: “no road the wonderful beauty and the exquisite grace and symmetry that have made this I did not see One cannot see how really beautiful a really beautiful woman is after considerable acquaintance with this rock this rock." (68).

Travel Posters and Postcards

"The 'Visit' posters are the work of Mitchell Loeb, a Jewish American who ran a commercial art studio that produced the 'Visit Palestine' posters for the Tourist Office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine in 1947, one year before Israel's independence and Palestine's Nakba. I have selectively cropped them, and, in one case, 'Weird Apparition,' included an index of references to Arabs in Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad" (Metres 162). The section "Unto a Land I Will Show Thee" begins with the same travel poster including the title phrase, where "a land" is "the promised land." (73), as does the section "Returning to Jaffa," along with a quote from David Ben-Gurion, former prime minister of Israel. This quote frames the story of Jaffa as a mystery: "I couldn't understand. Why did the inhabitants [of Jaffa]...leave?" (105). Section IX. begins with the same poster with many sections erased. In this instance, a figure appears in the shadows where there once was none. And in section X. more of the poster is erased, and the figure has been replaced by a blue shape.

Artwork

The painting at the opening of "A Concordance of Leaves" is "Remains" by Manal Deeb. Manal Deeb "is a Palestinian-American visual artist who works between the Washington DC area, USA, and Ramallah, Palestine...A desire for happiness, which is the unavoidable attendance of consciousness of pleasure and pain, Manal's work is an attempt to reach a conscious happiness away from home (in exile)." (Y Galleri). Section VII. opens with a stark black-and-white map of what has been titled "Holy Land," with letters scribbled out to read "o Land." "Mediterranean Sea" is changed into "Terra Sea." Printed strips of text that seem copy-pasted from old travel literature criss-cross the map.

Parentheticals

“My sister’s path led our family to Palestine a decade later. ‘A Concordance of Leaves’ details that 2003 visit to Toura in the West Bank for her wedding.” (160) This section is written almost entirely in couplets, with an open parenthesis in between each couplet. On parenthesis in this section, Metres has this to say: “The parentheses marks in this poem is an attempt to pry open the sense about what’s deprioritized, what’s included, and what’s excluded.” (Between the Covers). Each page, too, is headed with ورق (waraq), which means leaf. The only point at which this breaks is on pages 20 and 35, where there are two columns, the left in English, and the right in Arabic; on 27-28, which is written in single lines with a parenthesis in between; and on 37, where the form is preserved but the title is “Coda,” not ورق. “Coda” is either: a concluding musical section that is formally distinct from the main structure; a concluding part of a literary or dramatic work; or something that serves to round out, conclude, or summarize and usually has its own interest (Merriam-Webster). Many poems in the section "Unto a Land I Will Show Thee" are titled "[ ]," a name which suggests boxes as well as the edges of maps or any "thing with edges" (82).