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Cartography is defined as the science or skill of making maps. Mapmaking, in turn, requires stability in the landscape. So the title of Alaskan poet Mike Burwell’s new collection, “Cartography of Water,” initially seems counterintuitive, or at least until the reader dives into the book. Burwell is a poet intensely focused on landscape, but the ground that he writes about shifts like the tide, so his title makes perfect sense.

“Cartography of Water” contains 57 poems that spring from observations of the natural world. Most are clearly drawn from the author’s experiences in Alaska, where he has at various times surveyed logging roads, worked as a guide, climbed mountains, taught poetry, and now writes environmental impact statements for the U.S. Department of Interior. His familiarity with this state runs deep, and it shows in his observations, which quietly yet forcefully provide new understandings of our surroundings.

The most powerful poem in this collection, “The Road Around Big Salt,” comes early. Big Salt is located in Southeast Alaska and is a place where Burwell helped build a road many years ago.

It’s “Not a lake,” he tells us, “but a piece of sea kept to itself.” The sense of peace is quickly shattered when Burwell writes that it was there that he first “saw an eagle plunge on a salmon, close its talons on the silver back and fly, where wolves left a blacktail fawn half-eaten in the road.”

Thus he sets the stage for a series of deaths that have occurred in and around this lake. In the ‘40s a DC-3 crashed there, “left dreaming wantonly in the spruce on the north shore.” The crew was lost. In the ‘70s Burwell worked on a road-building crew there and “read Dostoevsky and thought of God after hours of pounding stakes through mud and rock, girding spruce and yellow cedar with pink and orange.”

Afterward, a string of acquaintances of Burwell’s come to their ends in this same place: one whose plane was found “pressed into a hill of fog and hemlock;” another who finished his life “with meticulous hand loads in his .38;” and a couple lost in a “chopper whose turbine breathed too much early snow.”

It’s a sad poem about a place that was never still and continues to move and change. This is how Burwell creates his cartography of water.

Burwell divides this book into six sections. One of these, simply titled “Light,” is an exemplary demonstration of his understanding of Alaska. Outsiders tend to think of the northernmost state as a place of complete light in summer and utter darkness in winter. But those of us who live here know that light takes on varied forms in each of the seasons. It changes here in ways those living in more temperate zones never experience.

And so only three of Burwell’s 12 poems in this section are written about summer’s light. Others look to spring, fall, and winter. Winter’s light, in fact, has a distinct quality all its own, which he captures in another poem later in the book: “Winter light grants bright, brief gold to a small cleft of rock dusted in light snow.”

Burwell is spartan in his use of language. These poems are short, never more than two pages, and some just a few lines. He distills his thoughts to the basics and leaves vast gaps for the reader to go back and fill. His writing is brief but never simple, pointed yet never too direct.

In a CD that accompanies this book, Burwell reads seven poems and is interviewed by his publisher, Anne Covay. The two briefly discuss whether Burwell is an environmentalist poet or not. He is to some extent, but Burwell’s writing escapes easy pigeonholing. His environmentalism is more about awareness than it is about politics. He pushes his readers to think, but never clubs them over their heads with ideology.

This is particularly clear in a cycle of poems about traveling the Yukon River. On a stop in Eagle he wonders, “Was the sky this blue the summer of 1913? ...Were the aspen on the ridges just turning gold?” Or were people, then as now, simply too preoccupied to notice what was happening around them? He asks, “were these towns growing too loudly on hope, sleeping too soundly on prayer? Did your boat steam smoothly over water murmuring only gold and tomorrow?”

Burwell isn’t passing judgment here; he’s simply trying to find his way into the minds of those who came before him, a far more arduous task than berating them for their actions.

Another mind Burwell wants to understand is that of his son, who is in his 30s and mentally disabled. This theme is taken up in another section of the book, comprised of six short poems. The gulf between the two men is insurmountable.

Burwell writes of his son, “Your visible head, a sanctum of visions, arcane dust congealing into sweet gasses, trembling colors, propelling you far past our dark and plundered nucleus.” In response to the child’s needs, Burwell finds that “inside I roll through an ebony tunnel carved by your pain.”

Mike Burwell is distinctly talented. His poems have previously been published in various journals as well as a pair of chapbooks, but this is the first time his work has been gathered up into one formal volume. Kudos are due to publisher Covay, who has made this the first book to come out through her newly established Northshore Press, a small literary press out of Lake Clark. It’s a promising debut for both author and publisher.