Most of us glance past the cherubs on an old map. They fill the corners and decorate the serious business of coastlines and compass points. Michael John Pickering's poem stops and looks at them. In eight short lines he turns a piece of ornament into a small scene of play, and his central idea is that even the decorative margins of a map are alive with breath and movement. The cherubs' puffed cheeks, familiar from the winds blown across antique charts, become a game, a flight and a homecoming.
The poem begins with a pair of adverbs, "Softly and baroquely". The first is gentle and ordinary. The second is surprising, because "baroque" is normally a word for a style of art, not a way of doing something. Pickering turns it into a manner of action, as if the cherubs' ornate curls and swags were part of how they move. The sentence that follows is oddly formal. Cheeks "are disposed", which sounds like something said of furniture or troops, as though the cherubs have been arranged on the page by a cartographer. "Disposed" also hints at temperament, a cheerful disposition, so the word is both composed and mischievous.
The sound of these lines does much of the work. "Podded", "prodding" and "disposed" share their p and d sounds, and say aloud they make the lips pop and the cheeks swell, as if the reader is puffing too. "Podded" is the sharpest choice. It suggests peas in a pod, plump and tightly packed, so the cherubs' faces become something grown as well as painted. The hard k sounds of "baroquely", "cheeks" and "cherubs" in the opening lines add a crisp counterpoint to the softness the first line promises.
The poem's best image comes in the fifth line, where the cheeks prod the air "with breathy shuttlecocks". A shuttlecock is light, feathered and batted back and forth, and the metaphor catches the way a puff of breath is launched and floats. It also turns the cherubs into players in a game, which suits their childlike look. The word "breathy" does double duty, describing the sound of the puffs and the substance of the shuttlecocks, since breath is all they are made of. Because the feathers belong to birds, the image prepares the next move: "Flying home to nest / in cartographic rafters".
Here the map becomes a building. The frame and borders turn into "rafters", a roof structure where birds might shelter. "Cartographic" is the longest, most technical word in the poem, and setting it beside the homely "nest" is the poem's quiet joke. Measurement and warmth share a roof. The breaths, now almost birds, return to the very structure that drew them.
Pickering gives the poem no regular metre. The lines are short, mostly two or three stresses each, so it moves in light bursts, like the puffs it describes. Rhyme arrives late and economically. "Nest" in line six is answered by "west" in line eight, with "rafters" standing between them, so the echo comes like a shuttlecock dropping back. The final line, "east to west", is only three syllables long. It works as a compass direction, the only one in the poem, and as the length of the flight. It also gives the map's whole width back to the breath that crosses it.
The poem's significance lies in this combination of wit and attention. Its title calls the object a "poster", a reproduction hung on a wall, which is a still thing. The poem answers by animating it, so that the image seems to exhale. It also moves the reader's eye away from the territory the map claims to describe and toward the margins where the mapmaker's imagination was allowed to play. In eight lines it suggests that even a picture of the world's order needs a little air to move through it.