Abstract 

Critical reception of what poetry is has overtime varied and as such has given way for a panoply of conceptions. One of such popular notions being that the poem is a looking-glass or mirror through which extraneous realities may be brought to fore. Even more, the poem is often taken as a storehouse of the author’s ideas so that critics are engendered to readily engage the poem for a robust harvest of “meanings” shelved in it. This mode of critical analysis has only called for an abandonment of the literary work itself while extra-textual issues – society, ecology, gender, race – are preserved in the front burner and geared all the attention. This study, however, aims at restoring the literary work to its fore position by taking up the poem for what it is: a poem. This way, the poem’s meaning is no less the poem itself. The study agrees that truth is inextricably membered with poetry and this truth being that which the Greeks name aletheia, meaning the unconcealedness of Being. Poetry, in this light, is that which unconceals, lets Being stand in the light of itself. Adopting the Heideggerian theory of poetry, this paper analyzes Kei Miller’s collection of poems, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. 

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