The Watercourse Poems

In her third book, her first in eight years, Zarin turns her consummate art to fresh purposes. Taking up the subject of divorce and the splintering and re-forming of family that follows it, she makes her way through a time of guilt and sorrow in an oblique yet precise tone that is unique in contemporary poetry. Whether escorting a brood of children to the swimming pool in the ninth month of pregnancy or contemplating a parrot or a bruise on her knee, Zarin reveals beauty in the working-out of subtle statements of feeling -- as in these lines about figure skating in Harlem on Christmas Day: Folly tells the truth by what it's not -- one X equals a fall I'd not forgo. Are ice and fire the integers we've got?Skating backwards tells another story -- the risky star above the freezing town, a way to walk on water and not drown.Always attentive to the rash life of the heart, Zarin offers us a gorgeous, mature, and profoundly moving collection.