Waterborne: Poems

by Linda Gregerson

Overview

A stirring, brilliantly crafted collection, Linda Gregerson's third volume of poetry examines mortality in all its beauty and horror. Fluently rendered in Gregerson's distinctive three-line stanzas, these poems explore subjects from autism to genealogy to ecology. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618382026
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/27/2004
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.22(d)

About the Author

Linda Gregerson is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently of Prodigal: New and Selected Poems. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Helen Zell Writers’ Program.

Read an Excerpt

Waterborne
1.
The river is largely implicit here, but part
of what
becomes it runs from east to west beside

our acre of buckthorn and elm.
(And part
of that, which rather weighs on Steven’s mind,

appears to have found its way to the basement. Water
will outwit
a wall.) It spawns real toads, our little

creek, and widens to a wetland just
across
the road, where shelter the newborn

fawns in May. So west among the trafficked fields,
then south, then
east, to join the ample Huron on its

curve beneath a one-lane bridge. This bridge
lacks every
grace but one, and that a sort of throwback

space for courteous digression:
your turn,
mine, no matter how late we are, even

the county engineers were forced to take their road
off plumb. It’s heartening
to think a river makes some difference.

2.
Apart from all the difference in the world,
that is.
We found my uncle Gordon on the marsh

one day, surveying his new ditch and raining
innovative
curses on the DNR. That’s Damn Near

Russia, since you ask. Apparently
my uncle
and the state had had a mild dispute, his

drainage scheme offending some considered
larger
view. His view was that the state could come

and plant the corn itself if it so loved
spring mud. The river
takes its own back, we can barely

reckon fast and slow. When Gordon was a boy
they used to load
the frozen river on a sledge here and

in August eat the heavenly reward—sweet
cream—
of winter’s work. A piece of moonlight saved

against the day, he thought. And this is where
the Muir boy
drowned. And this is where I didn’t.

3.
Turning of the season, and the counter-
turn
from ever-longer darkness into light,

and look: the river lifts to its lover the sun
in eddying
layers of mist as though

we hadn’t irreparably fouled the planet
after all.
My neighbor’s favorite spot for bass is just

below the sign that makes his fishing
rod illegal,
you might almost say the sign is half

the point. The vapors draft their languorous
excurses on
a liquid page. Better than the moment is

the one it has in mind.

Copyright © 2002 by Linda Gregerson. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.

Table of Contents

	Eyes Like Leeks	1
	Noah's Wife	4
	Cord	7
	The Day-Breaking If Not the Full Sun Shining on the Progresse of the Gospel in New-England	10
	Maculate	14
	The Horses Run Back to Their Stalls	17
	Double Portrait with American Flags	19
	An Offering	25
	Waterborne	26
	Half Light	29
	Pass Over	34
	Narrow Flame	39
	Petrarchan	40
	Cranes on the Seashore	44

Editorial Reviews

Accomplishments abound in Gregerson's elegant third collection of poems, which is clearly informed by her work as a Renaissance scholar. Intimate conversations are made worldly, peppered with parentheticals and interrupted by other voices. A poem on her father's death is set against lines from Luke 12 and her father's own retelling of a Depression-era Red Cross drive; the poem becomes an elegy completed by acts of faith and charity. Gregerson's rich aesthetic allows her best poems to resonate metaphysically, offering a way to live both now and in history: "the past / that has a place for us will know us by / our scattered / wake."

New Yorker

``Onward and upward with onions'' could be the rallying cry of the Griffiths (The Best of the Midwest), whose two previous cookbooks celebrated foods from the farmlands of the U.S. Thanks in part to a near-obsessive recounting of anecdotes, the authors bring a world of onions to the reader. Fortunately, only one dessert is listed among the more than 210 recipes that make up the enormous work: an award-winning chocolate coconut pecan surprise cake baked with super-sweet Walla Walla onions. A many-layered history of onions is enlivened by the advice of popular professional chefs on how to avoid tears when cutting ``smokers''-those searingly hot onions whose juices sting the eyes (use a very sharp knife, or wear scuba goggles). A crew of celebrity chefs contributed recipes. The text is presented with much good humor (``never have so many tears been shed over a project that was this much fun''), though the jocularity can sometimes make a reader wince (under the ``Onion Power'' heading: ``Impotent? Try red pepper, beer, onions and whiskey. Enough of the whiskey and you won't care''). (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Gregerson's understated sophomore volume, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, focused on mothers, children and family tragedy; this follow-up broadens her subjects while retaining her distinctive form. Gregerson's trademark three-line, sandwich-shaped stanzas accommodate long and short sentences, awe and baffled suffering, quick changes and sustained visual attention. Here those stanzas illuminate subjects from autism to wilderness to suburban ecology, from biblical cruxes to Norwegian-American genealogy and emergency-room night shifts. Gregerson (who teaches at the University of Michigan) is also a respected Renaissance scholar, and her Shakespearean knowledge informs the moving opening poem, which fans out from a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream to exclaim, "how odd to be this and no other and, like all the others, marked for death?" A cento of Puritan texts asks, "What meaneth, Ye shall be my Jewells?" while a compact poem set earlier in this century offers "another sorry tale about class in America." The three-part "Passover" reviews recent history with a heavy heart ("If anyone here were in charge, my vote is scrap us and start over"), yet the same poem retains humor and scope enough to focus on the recent film Magnolia. There and in the title poem (included in last year's Best American Poetry), water and watersheds stand at once for the course of history and the perils of human indifference. (Apr.) Forecast: Though her distant models or analogues include Stephen Dunn and the early Jorie Graham, Gregerson has made her subjects her own. Strongly felt, driven by human stories and formally impressive, this volume may well garner both a broad readership and a major award. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Tough, ironic and jagged-they jackknife back and forth across the page-Gregerson's poems face the hard questions of living head on. There's a stillness here, an intellectual solidity, in which readers can rest. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal