The Water Between Us

by McCallum, Shara

• ISBN13: 9780822957102
• ISBN10: 0822957108
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

I	3	(28)
In the Garden of Banana and Coconut Trees	3	(1)
Apple	4	(1)
Pleasant Hi1l	5	(2)
8 Hope Road	7	(1)
Poem Where My Mother and Father Are Absent	8	(2)
What I Saved	10	(1)
The Perfect Heart	11	(1)
Fruit	12	(1)
The Feast to Celebrate His Majesty's Birthday	13	(1)
First Rites	14	(1)
Mother	15	(1)
The Awakening	16	(1)
jack mandoora me no choose none	17	(14)
II	31	(14)
What Lies Beneath	31	(1)
Debt	32	(1)
The Spell	33	(1)
The Evolution of Useful Things	34	(1)
poppies	35	(1)
What the Stories Teach	36	(1)
Dove	37	(1)
For you sweetheart	38	(2)
Something Like Flying	40	(1)
The Remains	41	(1)
Darkling I Listen	42	(3)
III	45	(22)
May 1981	45	(1)
What I'm Telling You	46	(1)
Sunset on the Wharf	47	(1)
Losing Footing	48	(1)
What We Forget	49	(1)
Jamaica, 1978	50	(1)
Jamaica, October 18, 1972	51	(1)
Persephone Sets the Record Straight	52	(2)
Mother Love	54	(1)
untitled	55	(1)
What my mother taught me:	56	(1)
Lullaby	57	(1)
Discubriendo una Fotografia de Mi Madre	58	(1)
Yu no send. Me no come.	59	(3)
In my other life	62	(1)
Seed	63	(4)
IV	67	(20)
the siren's defense	67	(1)
A Warning	68	(1)
Siren Isles	69	(1)
I Promise You This	70	(1)
Enough	71	(1)
The Sea Returns	72	(1)
The Daughter, Left	73	(1)
When I think of you	74	(1)
Calypso	75	(2)
Apsara	77	(1)
Two Sides	78	(1)
The Fisherman's Wife	79	(1)
The Meeting	80	(2)
The Exchange	82	(1)
The Choice Made	83	(1)
The tragedy of the mermaid	84	(1)
What the Oracle Said	85	(2)
Acknowledgments	87