The Watercourse

by Cynthia Zarin

In her third book of poetry, her first in eight years, Cynthia Zarin, one of the finest poets of her generation, has turned her art to fresh purposes. Taking up the subject of divorce and the splintering and re-forming of family that follows it, Zarin, whose work has been compared to that of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, addresses the passage through a time of guilt and sorrow in an oblique yet precise tone that is unique in contemporary poetry. At the book’s center is a powerful sequence of love poems, in which she asks, “Is it light on the trees / that turns them to pale fire / or is it spring, come without / warning to this town on / stilts . . . ?” Whether taking a brood of children to the swimming pool, contemplating a parrot, or imagining a temperate landscape “where Orion / could shoot the bear along the river, and miss, and miss,” Zarin continually reveals beauty in subtle statements of feeling.

The Watercourse is a gorgeous, mature, and profoundly moving collection.


From the Hardcover edition.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, as well five books for children and a collection of essays. She teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.