In the Beautiful Waters

In the Beautiful Waters is about a journey. The journey begins, as journeys do, with a leaving and ends with a coming home; it encompasses new places and experiences, but primarily involves putting old places and experiences into a new perspective. The poems are about love and hate, the ties that bind; life, pain, death, and memory, which is the stuff of poetry; and about art and old stories. The dominant images throughout the collection are water and night, and the poems show a combination, which some call Celtic, of dark wit and lyric sensibility in tension with one another. The poems often have a formal structure, but most are in free verse.