The Water Between Us

by Shara McCallum

Overview

1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner.Shara McCallum is the eighteenth winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, one of the nation's most prestigious awards for a first book of poetry. 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 distances: 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822980766
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/15/2014
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US & UK, including No Ruined Stone. McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room, an anthology of poems selected from across her six books and translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández, was published in 2021 by Mantis Editores in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and have been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz. Awards for her work include the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (for her previous book, Madwoman), a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (for her first book, The Water Between Us). McCallum delivers readings, lectures, and workshops at universities and literary festivals in the US and internationally and has taught creative writing and literature at various universities. She is presently on the faculty of the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and is a Professor of English at Penn State University. McCallum was appointed the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate.
From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US and UK. Her most recent, No Ruined Stone, won the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room, an anthology of her poems translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández, was published in 2021 in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, McCallum’s poems have been translated into French, Italian, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz. Awards for her work include the Silver Musgrave Medal from the Jamaican government, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress, and an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, among others. McCallum is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Penn State University and a faculty member in the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program. From 2021-22, she served as the Penn State Laureate. She is a 2023-24 Guggenheim Fellow. WEBSITE: www.sharamccallum.com

Table of Contents

Contents I In the Garden of Banana and Coconut Trees Apple Pleasant Hill 8 Hope Road Poem Where My Mother and Father Are Absent What I Saved The Perfect Heart Fruit The Feast to Celebrate His Majesty’s Birthday First Rites Mother, The Awakening jack mandoora me no choose none II What Lies Beneath Debt The Spell The Evolution of Useful Things poppies What the Stories Teach Dove For you sweetheart, Something Like Flying The Remains Darkling I Listen III May 1981 What I’m Telling You Sunset on the Wharf Losing Footing What We Forget Jamaica, 1978 Jamaica, October 18, 1972 Persephone Sets the Record Straight Mother Love untitled What my mother taught me: Lullaby Discubriendo una Fotografía de Mi Madre Yu no send. Me no come. In my other life, Seed IV the siren’s defense A Warning Siren Isles I Promise You This Enough The Sea Returns The Daughter, Left When I think of you, Calypso Apsara Two Sides The Fisherman’s Wife The Meeting The Exchange The Choice Made The tragedy of the mermaid What the Oracle Said Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

The poems in The Water Between Us work to a compelling cumulative effect. . . .  McCallum’s poems investigate childhood through the speaker’s engagement in the excavation of a literal and figurative prelapsarian garden. . . The poems possess a layered allusiveness; they are both discovery and invention. This work incorporates fairy tale and myth to enlarge upon and dramatize its narrative, which is rendered in simple, clear, almost transparent language. . . . This is an arresting new voice, it sings like a ‘surf rupturing herself again and again’.”
—Boston Review


“Shara McCallum is well launched. Her first book, The Water Between Us is beautiful, a weak word to describe such strong poems but beautiful they are, sad and happy, amusing and sobering in their telling of identity, of grief and of pride. She has chosen wisely not to footnote or explain the words peculiar to her culture. She leaves the reader to learn from the rhythm of them all that matters, to absorb them as a child would her own language that leans not on grammar but on sound. She may be young but she is far from immature.”
—Poetlore


“McCallum’s poems are startling in their breadth of experience and language . . . [they] wrestle with her own history  as well as with our accepted history, and while her answers are not always pleasant, they are never without truth stolen from lies, beauty wrenched from pain.”
—Smartish Pace

From the Publisher