Water Bearer: a pouring of poems

Water Bearer, Susan Bernardo's debut poetry collection, moves through the emotional terrain of one woman's life with the precision of a scientist and the tenderness of a devoted witness. From a fragmented childhood through marriage, motherhood, miscarriage, divorce, new love, addiction, and the loss of parents, these poems refuse to look away. Instead, Bernardo seeks a way through.

What sets Bernardo apart is her gift for grounding the deepest human experiences in the physical world. In "Spin Cycle," the inner ear's vestibular system mirrors a mother's shifting center of gravity as she watches her son ride a bike alone for the first time. A dying mother-in-law's chemotherapy port becomes the Panama Canal - channels cut into the body to ferry impossible loads, and the tidal pull of the East River mirrors the push and pull of grief itself in her award-winning poem "Tonic Waters." In "Water and the Witch," a mother's desperate attempt to end her son's tantrum ends with both of them in a cold February pool - and a bathroom door unlocked from the inside. In "Rock and Water," love itself becomes geological - a marriage of seeming opposites written in tide and granite, fault lines and flash floods, the intertidal zone where two elements meet to dance. Again and again, Bernardo reaches into science, nature, and ancient mythology - the Irish goddess Brigid, the earth mother Danū, Persephone - finding in metaphor the precise language to illuminate life's confusion and heartbreak.

These are not poems written safely from the other side of suffering. In "Threadbare," the thread of a life is lost at her mother's bedside, on the road to a halfway house, snipped by the Fates without a note - and the poem itself unravels on the page, line by line, as if language, too, might give out. But Water Bearer does not end in the dark. In "First Kiss," a woman drives to the beach with her windows open and a car that smells of rotten eggnog, and finds herself inexplicably happy, impossibly young, agelessly wise - pulling a u-turn into a parking lot to drink in the sunset and raise a glass to the universe. In "Bridges," after building a thousand spans for someone who could not cross, she chooses at last to live completely on the dancing side of the river fear. And in "Lily Rising," the calla lilies awaken after fierce winter storms, nourished by the ashes of the mother, a lone monarch hovering, the cycle complete: glory gone / glory given / glory receive.

Through it all, Bernardo's poet self is untameable - chasing butterflies into wild meadows, bleeding freely onto the page, resting in a cozy couplet on a hillside dotted with clover until the moon and stars are close enough to touch. This is a collection of remarkable range: by turns tender, fierce, witty, and quietly fearless. Water Bearer will resonate with readers of Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, and Jane Hirshfield, and with anyone who has loved and grieved and fallen in the pool with their kid and picked themselves back up again.

Water flows through this collection as both subject and soul - tidal, reversing, evaporating, raining back to earth. It is the medium through which loss is carried, love is celebrated, and the self is tested, lost, and sometimes, slowly, found again.