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Water Quality (Volume 87)
I find my bearings by clouds of moon jellies / afloat beneath my anchored boat, / pulsing the sea’s bright night, / their milky way, unfurling.
In these lush and vivid poems water gloves a swimmer’s body, is “satin, yes, viscous. Albumen, vernix, newborn slick.” In Hong Kong it “rinses gai lan – bright green in a silver bowl” or hibernates in the Pacific Northwest “under a silky pelt / of rain. People-less. Days, months of this / hiss, softness breaking cliffs.”
Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool simmering through a family’s veins, water is the main character here. It can be turbid, the amniotic colour of spittle, or, in a time of drought, “brilliant beads.” As “a stream flushed over granite,” water seems to want “so little it shares another’s colour,” yet here, it gets our full and necessary attention.
Rich with vibrant language and intensity, these poems sizzle in lyric form, monologues, elegy, and haibun. Water Quality calls on us to consider that our very survival is at stake unless we make a vow to this vital element to cherish it as we would a partner.
In these lush and vivid poems water gloves a swimmer’s body, is “satin, yes, viscous. Albumen, vernix, newborn slick.” In Hong Kong it “rinses gai lan – bright green in a silver bowl” or hibernates in the Pacific Northwest “under a silky pelt / of rain. People-less. Days, months of this / hiss, softness breaking cliffs.”
Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool simmering through a family’s veins, water is the main character here. It can be turbid, the amniotic colour of spittle, or, in a time of drought, “brilliant beads.” As “a stream flushed over granite,” water seems to want “so little it shares another’s colour,” yet here, it gets our full and necessary attention.
Rich with vibrant language and intensity, these poems sizzle in lyric form, monologues, elegy, and haibun. Water Quality calls on us to consider that our very survival is at stake unless we make a vow to this vital element to cherish it as we would a partner.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
Published September 15, 2024
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January 4, 2026
Totally refreshing. Kerkham's collection, in four parts, isn't *about* water so much as it is *given form* by it: these poems are best read as an embodiment of the flexibility and rhythm of aquatic thought. This is the "Quality" in the title -- water taking and giving a general form (flowing, undulating rivulets; silent, murky pools; silty subterranian aquifers) but also being measured for its specific contents (an excess of nitrogen and phosphorus: eutrophication). Whether it serves as an organising locus (a particular river lending historical insight, or a lake lending its setting to a poem), a circulating current (verses returning between stanzas as refrains, recursive (e)motions with new (e/a)ffects), or an existential flood (a reminder that water does not offer opportunities for togetherness but serves as fluid 'grounds' for discrimination) water spills and pools between background and foreground, form and content, object of attraction and attracting object, origin and expiration.
Academic brain off for a moment: what stands out to me is Kerkham's affective register. I would say it's marked by a certain 'invested ambivalence' (hm. academic brain isn't fully off. oh well). What I mean by this is that, like water, she seems content with trailing along the reader in her wake, channeling us in sometimes opposing trajectories. "who deserves this?" She asks, refering to the luxury of a beach spa's numerous heated pools -- and excessive consumption of fresh (which becomes chlorinated; which becomes saline) water -- followed by: "Who doesn't want it?" Captured in so many of these poems is that frustrating barrier standing in the way of so many discussions on climate change and water in particular: the phrase 'but I like the way things are now' that can exist only by a constant evasion of coming face to face with the logical conclusions of maintaining current (white, Western, wealthy) societies' consumptive habits. Because, like water, habits are flows, even if they risk becoming circular, entrenched, and eventually, still and stale.
Lots to return to over the course of the year.
Academic brain off for a moment: what stands out to me is Kerkham's affective register. I would say it's marked by a certain 'invested ambivalence' (hm. academic brain isn't fully off. oh well). What I mean by this is that, like water, she seems content with trailing along the reader in her wake, channeling us in sometimes opposing trajectories. "who deserves this?" She asks, refering to the luxury of a beach spa's numerous heated pools -- and excessive consumption of fresh (which becomes chlorinated; which becomes saline) water -- followed by: "Who doesn't want it?" Captured in so many of these poems is that frustrating barrier standing in the way of so many discussions on climate change and water in particular: the phrase 'but I like the way things are now' that can exist only by a constant evasion of coming face to face with the logical conclusions of maintaining current (white, Western, wealthy) societies' consumptive habits. Because, like water, habits are flows, even if they risk becoming circular, entrenched, and eventually, still and stale.
Lots to return to over the course of the year.
Displaying 1 of 1 review