Water Between Us (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

McCallum, Shara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822957108 ISBN 13: 9780822957102

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999

Synopsis

1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner.

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Shara McCallum’s first boo, The Water Between Us, won the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Born in Jamaica, she lives and works in Memphis, Tennessee.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Seed

I am a child of the sun, balancing the wind on my hips. I have learned to make stones dance, to walk with each footfall echoing silence, to listen to the songs of leaves. I am a child of the rushing sea: waves, the sound of my listening; salt, the scent of my sight. I have taken machete to the coconut, ground sugarcane between my teeth, to unclasp their sweetened rhymes. At dawn, I have held the waking earth, each grain of dirt and sand spilling from my half-open hands. Wherever I am, I am that space between the husk and the heart of the fruit.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0822957108
• ISBN 13: 9780822957102
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96