Waterborne2002

The river is largely implicit here," writes Linda Gregerson about her acre of woods. Whether open to view or underground, her river maps communal fate: everything that lives is its direct dependent. The river can also bring infection; it is a branching repository for toxicity. It carries news, much of which is a litany of harm--recklessness, malice, failures of heart, and failures of attention--but the poems in Waterborne somehow extract from adversity a syntax of devotion. "The past / that has a place for us will know us by / our scattered wake," Gregerson also writes. The resilient tercets in which these poems are written might themselves be thought of as a scattered wake--the luminous record of movement through various lives. These stirring and brilliantly crafted poems can be considered tools for staging daily rescues from oblivion. Their occasions are diverse--a barn fire, a wounded deer, a child's determined struggle with a bicycle--but their instinct is always to wrest from the impure world a vernacular of praise.