Overview

The largest section of As Water Moves made up mostly of reconstructed or remembered events in the poet's life, necessarily isolated from one another to support either narrative or argumentative coherence or both. Towards the end of that section (""One Lane Road"") and in the ""Letters From Kepler"" section he ventures into the broader question of what life might be. Life is difficult to describe for him, but it is likened to water or air, the mind's attention, love, time, rushing to get a train, in that it flows. As far as we can tell, the flowing never stops. So, the poems in this book rely heavily on specific encounters with the smaller elements of the cosmos, but a few of them try, one might say, riding a bull, where like a bull rider, the poet, is bucked off. The section called ""Manhattan"" celebrates Mitchell's love of the city that never sleeps. The ""Prairie Warp"" section continues his long interest in identifiable biotas (Adirondacks, tundra in ""Half/Mask"", and The Everglades in ""The One Good Bite in the Saw-Grass Plant""), in this case the vast ocean bottom known as the North American Prairie, as encountered in Canada's Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan. Finally, the ""Letter to Maira Azam"" is a kind of poem rarely written now, a letter of thanks to a living stranger.

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9781953252937

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Reviews

"""In his stunning new collection, Roger Mitchell discovers 'that the hill we stood on / looking off in the distance / for the thing was the thing itself.' Like William Carlos Williams, Mitchell searches for an ever-flowering present in the things of this world and practices deep attention to people, place, and memory. AS WATER MOVES brilliantly charts the fluidity of attention, moving between natural observation, familial recollections, local relations, and compassionate perception. These poems present a riverous map of the psyche, tributaries of thought leading to a larger body of knowing where the observer and observed become one. As Mitchell says, 'The edges of things turn toward each other / as though there were no otherness or kind.' I have been reading Roger Mitchell's poetry for forty-five years and always find in it nourishing streams and wellsprings of human compassion. AS WATER MOVES is his latest gift of a poetics that seeks the fruits of a deep practice of generosity and love."" --George Kalamaras"

Author Information

Roger Mitchell is the author of 12 previous books of poetry, most recently REASON'S DREAM (Dos Madres, 2018) and The One Good Bite in the Saw-Grass Plant (Natural Dam Publishing, 2010), poems written in The Everglades while on an AIRIE Fellowship. New work can be found in Stand, Tar River Poetry, Blueline, Poetry East, On the Seawall, Mudlark and other journals. He has recently published Their Own Society (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2022), a collection of reviews and essays, and completed a biography of the poet Jean Garrigue. He lives in Jay, New York, with his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy.

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