The Taste of River Water

I have just savoured the most moving book of poems, The Taste of River Water, by Cate Kennedy. Kennedy writes with gentle and accessible voice about the most mundane events: a joyride, a locust plague, a country woman coming second in a photography competition. Each poem feels like a story, a glimpse of another life seen through kind eyes.

Kennedy has a remarkable ability to notice the small things: the humility of a mother listening to her adult children talk, the largely invisible acts of grace which dot family life, the effect of a painting on a young girl. She uses no poetic mumbo-jumbo, no fancy frills, just clear plain words telling the story, usually in blank verse.

The risk of blank verse is that it can, at times, read like little more than a thoughtful paragraph broken up into a poem shape; and one or two of her poems do seem to fall into that trap. Usually, however, she manages more than that, much more, so that words and rhythm work together to great effect. I particularly loved 'Binaries', which highlights the resonances between binary notation and a knitting pattern – and a mother who shakes her head at her clever kids who understand the former.

Kennedy occasionally uses a more formal structure. In her poem 'Love and work', which addresses the inevitability of grief, the words are complemented by the structure of the poem. The metre and rhyme scheme work together to convey a sense of inevitability and inescapability even as the words remind us just how unavoidable the work of grief is. It is a masterful use of form.

I usually flick back and forth through books of poetry, reading here and there, then filling in the gaps; but Section II of this book deserves reading in order. Although each poem may be read alone, together the poems tell the story of a journey – from the loss of a baby, the desolation of grief, the difficulty of conception, and the experience of birth. Kennedy's plain language keeps this story unsentimental as she charts the ravages of grief, brittleness between marriage partners, and the stillness of joy. Small phrases are echoed between the poems, weaving the section into a quietly magnificent whole.

What really makes Kennedy's poems luminescent, however, more than her observance of small things or her careful crafting of language, is her recognition of the sacred in the everyday. A lost ring becomes a blessing; an apparently empty room holds an unexpected gift; laying a brick path becomes an exercise in daily forgiveness, and the reader is reminded that thankfulness, forgiveness and grace are woven into the smallest of things. I read a poem a day, to draw out the pleasure of this slender book, and found myself moved, stirred, and ultimately restored. The Taste of River Water is a gift to all who read it; and this reader, for one, is filled with gratitude.

The Blizzard Voices

Everyone I love who has died has been cremated. The coffin disappeared with a mechanical whoosh, or a discreet curtain covered it up, and that's the last we saw of it. It's cold, clinical, institutional, fake, and it's not enough for me. I want to watch dirt cover the coffin and know that it's done. I want a place to visit, a place to sit and chat and cry and think.

So my husband and I will be buried. We will sink into the soil and turn into good earth. We will be in a place where our children can hold a picnic, and listen to the trees, and breathe goodbye over and again. In my fantasy world, I will be buried at a friend's block, quiet, unremarked, ignored for the most part, but a good place for a picnic; a place where the wind sings and a rainbow is often to be seen spanning the valley. In reality, we're visiting country cemeteries and seeing what's available.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to The Blizzard Voices. I find most poetry to be unutterably omphaloskeptical (I have always wanted to use that word in a sentence) and excruciatingly tedious.

And then there's Ted Kooser. Kooser is a poet who uses the cool spare language of the Great Plains. He is the poet for people who like stories, and other people. His language is clear, strong and wiry; and he tells the most wonderful tales.

The Blizzard Voices is a collection of poems about the terrible storm which struck the Plains in the late nineteenth century. Teachers and students were trapped in schoolhouses with limited fuel and food. Farmhands perished in the fields, unable to find their way home. Fathers sheltered under upturned wagons with their livestock, and lost hands and feet to the cold. Mothers sat anxiously at home waiting for their husbands and children to return: from school, from the neighbour's house, even from the barn just yards away.

Kooser collected the stories from those who remembered, and from old diaries and other reports. He shaped the material into a series of short poems, each speaking in a different voice to relate an image, a snippet, or an experience. Together, the poems form a chorus, and provide a sense of the many faces of the blizzard: finding a loved one dead in a snowdrift, and the methodical calm of a plainsman in dealing with it; the surprising experience of discovering turkeys days later, buried by the snow but alive and well; the quiet devastation of a young teacher who lost her way and held three young charges close as they died in the night; the sight of a man who lost arms and legs to frostbite being loaded onto a train; the line of sunflowers which led a teacher and her children to safety.

Reading the book, I felt I was sitting at the feet of a grandmother or a great-uncle, listening as they told stories by the fire. It is a deeply nourishing set of poems, tied to a particular time and place, but drawing the reader into a collective history, and giving the reader a sense that the history is part of our shared story.

As in his book Local Wonders, Kooser finishes the collection with a deeply moving piece which is a benediction of sorts; here, a blessing on those who died. He writes that the names of those buried unremarked and unremembered in the corners of fields are still carried on the wind. And I'm back to where I began. Two lifetimes and half a world away, I think of those lines whenever the wind blows, and hope that I too can one day be buried in a field somewhere, remembered for a few years, then left to the song of swaying grasses, and the ever changing crooning of the wind.

(You can read more about Kooser's book Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps here.)