The Water Between Us: Poems

by Shara McCallum

1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner.

The Water Between Us is a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the exile's struggle to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country. The book also centers on other kinds of physical and emotional those between mothers and daughters, those created by being of mixed racial descent, and those between colonizers and the colonized. Despite these distances, or perhaps because of them, the poems affirm the need for a multilayered and cohesive sense of self. McCallum's language is precise and graceful. Drawing from Anancy tales, Greek myth, and biblical stories, the poems deftly alternate between American English and Jamaican patois, and between images both familiar and surreal.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 23, 1999

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shara's poems are really interesting blends. They combine love for family with disappointment in or alienation from family members, classical/European references with Jamaican folk tales, standard written English with patois, self-esteem and self-criticism, etc. This is her first poetry collection, so this is definitely a younger voice than some of her later works (I've read one of her later books and heard her read, and am in the process of reading through all of her books now), but the basic elements of her mature poetic voice are distinctly there in this collection--the concerns with family, identity, and the spaces between.