There are places which do not exist, have no point of intersection, no latitude or longitude, and cannot be found in any atlas. We know some of these places better than places that exist. We all travel through the nonexistent worlds of Gulliver, Oz and Wonderland. In our minds we can see the hole next to the tree in Alice's country, the beach which Gulliver found peopled by dwarves or the emerald atmosphere of Oz. Like the imaginary worlds, the maps of our childhood and the memories of the places we dream of can be more vivid than any place in the material world.

In the book of poems by Nedda G. de Anhalt, Exile Notebooks, the author explores the personal geography of her memory. The poem that opens the collection tells us that "nostalgia and memories have kidnapped it and taken it away."

The map in her memory is Cuba, though she never names it and only calls it "The Island." But we recognize this ribbon of land as a lost piece of a puzzle located in the confluence of the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. The Island,she reminds us in one of the most surprising and original poems of the book, is this "Island drawn on the cake of the Godfather." Her book takes place at the intersection of these imaginary lines: Latitude 23 N, Longitude 83W. We can find the place and give the land its name.

Like the Balbec of Proust, the Yoknapatawpha of Faulkner and the Wessex of Hardy, where the names conceal a real place and function as a mask to create distance, Anhalt calls her faraway, lost homeland "The Island." But this does not fool us or hide thelandmarks of this place. We know where we are when Anhalt evokes the specifics; the smell of tobacco, the sound of son music, the nights in Bambú, Johnny's 88 and the Malecón.

The word Cuba comes from a Taino word, "cubanacán," which means "a central place." The Cuba of Anhalt is just this: The central place of her memories, the center of her mind, the center of someone who has moved outside of herself, who lives in the world outside her passion but, ironically, still has this fundamental passion within.

Nedda Anhalt's book is peopled by ghosts. Almost all the poems in the collection start out with an epigraph. When we read the book it becomes clear that they cease to be just citations from other writers to decorate the poems and become a chorus of voices which speak and become an important part of the book themselves. In these pages we find the voices of Reinaldo Arenas, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, José Martí, José Lezama Lima, Lydia Cabrera and others.

There are also anonymous spirits from the cemetery of Colón, which was founded in 1876 in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana. The sacred ground of this cemetery is famous for its beautiful marble tombs, impressive mausoleums and chapels. In a sad, chilling poem by Anhalt called "Sic Transit," she describes how, with Fidel Castro's government, even death is controlled. In Colón cemetery the tombs are very expensive and sought after, so after two years the remains are taken out of the tombs so other dead people can inhabit them, also for just a while. There is no eternity. Her poem starts out:

In this cemetery
One cannot sleep
In eternal peace.

There is another graveyard in Exile Notebooks. It is the 7,700 square nautical miles of sea that is between Cuba and Florida, one of the saddest places in the planet. Nobody knows how many people have drowned there. Some say it is hundreds and others think it is thousands. This is where the rafts go down, a cemetery of moving planes where the remains of the dead lie in tombs of water. In the poem "Balseros" Anhalt writes, in a tone that seems almost like the innocent rhyme of a child, these unnerving lines,

We were four, now we are three.

At the end of the book the reader knows perfectly well that this is not an imaginary island but it is, with no doubt, Anhalt's Cuba. The book is a tribute to her memory of the island and what has happened to Cuba under the brutal regimen of Fidel Castro. In her poem "Movement," which ends the collection, Nedda Anhalt leaves this very clear when she writes,

I invented The Island
It is not this nor that nor the other.