Waterborne (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Waterborne Shaen Pogue Waterborne by Linda GregersonMariner, 2002, 66 pp., $13 Linda Gregerson is the author of two previously published collections of poetry, Fire in the Conservatory and The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep. However, it is Gregerson's third publication, a slim volume of verse titled Waterborne, that has been making waves since its 2002 publication. Waterborne successfully walks the dividing line between public and personal, political and impartial, historical and imagined. In each of Waterborne's finely wrought poems, some element of water appears. The poems broach a variety of complex issues—child abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorder, religious conversion and environmentalism, among others—occasionally alluding to passages from the Bible or from more recent canonical works in order to shed new light on old subjects. Gregerson's unique triplet-lines, described as "butterfly-shaped tercets" by UK-based Stride magazine and as "Gregerson's trademark three-line, sandwich-shaped stanzas" by Publisher's Weekly, reveal the poet's tendency to favor a more irregular structure. In fact, in the summer 2002 issue of Michigan Today, interviewer John Woodford quoted Gregerson as admitting, "I like a more syncopated syntax . . . a line that breaks and frays." With just the proper mix of "break" and "fray," Waterborne's opening [End Page 175] poem, "Eyes Like Leeks," quickly captures a reader's attention from its cadenced and intriguing first sentence: "It had almost nothing to do with sex./The boy/in his corset and farthingale, his head-/voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin/was not/and never had been simply in our pay." However, it is Gregerson's stunning use of language, not style, that compels the reader, once invited, to continue reading. Poems slip seamlessly, nearly effortlessly, between formal language and a more relaxed dialogue based upon the rich, deliberate speech of Gregerson's childhood hometown. The latter sounds remarkably crisp and natural to the reader's ear, as if it were lifted directly from a life encounter. As well as extracting beauty from everyday language, Gregerson also renders ordinary subjects remarkable. A few lines from "Maculate" testify: "Oilcloth on the kitchen table, linoleum/under his chair, and both of them an ugly hiero-/glyphic/of yellow scorchmarks ringed with black./My father must be tired, to let the ash/between/his fingers and the still-lit butt-ends of his/days befoul the world around him so." Even the disturbing description of a fatal barn fire in "The Horses Run Back to Their Stalls" sounds sadly elegant under Gregerson's pen: "I'll never forget the morning after: ash/in the air all the way to town and the smell of those/poor animals,/who'd never harmed a soul." Like the "largely implicit" river of the collection's title poem, Gregerson's verse moves with both grace and urgency. Waterborne is beau-tiful, a captivating and compelling marriage of form and meaning. Copyright © 2004 The Curators of the University of Missouri