Book Review: Emotions run deep in this poetic masterpiece

Jun 07, 2015 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

Book: The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems
Author: Shara McCallum
Reviewer: Dr Glenville Ashby

‘The Face of Water’ offers a glimpse into the restless, provocative mind of Shara McCallum.

The book cover of The Face of Water

McCallum is not haunted in a pernicious sense; far from it. She is profoundly insightful, reliving and exorcizing her demons in the same breath. In many ways, her pains are ours. We were both born out of existential struggles, steeling our will to survive. We find a medium for expression in the arts, but few of us can perform with enviable range and depth.
‘The Face of Water’ combines the probing themes of identity and alienation with ingenious poetic displays of spacing, lineation, cadence and tone. Many are protest, conscious offerings. In ‘What I am Telling You,’ McCallum’s light shade is a matter for discourse, but she is too young to assert herself. “And where Bob, who was only a brother in Twelve Tribes to me at four or five, said to the man who called me whitey girl, that I was not, that I was a daughter of Israel…”
And ‘Yuh no send, Mi no Come,’ continues in like vein: “For the hundredth time I hear: Fi true? But yu so light, Yu nuh talk Jamaican. My sister laugh, offering: Yu better not call her no Yankee gal, papa. She will get vex with yuh. Living here again, she has the right to say: is fi country too.”
Readers travel deeper into the toilsome psyche of McCallum in ‘In My Other Life.’ Here, there are no barriers or inferences. “I was born with a stone in my hand,” she pens in the opening salvo. “I learned to tell the truth and shame the devil…” And her strength, self-confidence and intrepidity read like a laundry list. But it was all in another life, be it past or future.
This sense of abeyance is also felt in the disturbing ‘Descubriendo una fotografia de mi mama,’ (Finding a picture of my mother). The yearning is all-encompassing. Here, dehumanization and deculturalization set a dark, doleful tone.
In ‘Jack Mandoora Mi Nuh Choose None,’ McCallum reveals the inherent power of folk tales; they are psychological tools that pierce our persona to revel our true self.
What do we make of Anancy, the smartest spider? Ably using patois to colour her presentation, she writes, “Him always fooling every other creature. Mi remember papa used to tell plenty stories about Anancy…them always walking down the street looking for somebody him can fas with…Anancy the biggest ginnal mi can think of always tricking people and doing mischief…”
But should we relegate this trickster to the dusty pages of folk culture? McCallum argues otherwise. Maybe there is an Anancy embedded in all of us.
Mc Callum raises the bar with ‘I Promise You,’ arguably her most riveting ‘performance.’ With the assurance of King David and apocalyptic clamor of St John, she writes,
“Water finds its own level…Means your children will know my name. In the night when they dream, fists curled in their face, the last sound they hear will be the ocean filling their ears……your kin, your kin’s kin, for every generation to come, will fear the rush of the tide, the swell of the waves, the hint of the water already filling their cribs.”
Of equal brilliance is the spiritually charged ‘The Book of Mothers,” that hails the cosmic, mythological reach of the feminine principle. The Mother is Creator, Destroyer and Preserver, an uncontested holy trinity that holds sway over us.
“Dark Mother, you appear to me as mad. Mistress of blood and death, and the death of death, you surface from the Ganges, pregnant, stoop to give birth on shore, then devour your child,” she intones. “Mother, I am the dark in your eye…Motherhood: the promise of feathers against plucking fingers…Motherhood: the country of want, of want, of want…If you were a dress, I would wear you, just like my second skin…”
Feminine angst emerges in ‘Calypso,’ and ‘The Tragedy of the Mermaid.’
And desolation rages on an archetypal level in ‘What the Oracle said,’ and ‘The Story of Tanglehair.’ Yes, vestiges of William Blake’s dark brilliance.
‘The Face of Water’ is subtle, metaphorical and highly interpretive; with a blaring paradoxical thread running through its seam. McCallum invokes the curative but potentially destructive properties of the water element. Sanctity and Chaos live side by side; sometimes they are indistinguishable. Throughout, she invites us to wrestle the opposing forces within us; to redefine our experiences; to find new ways of reconciling our own struggles. McCallum is waging her own war. A similar battle awaits us.

Feedback: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby
The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems by Shara McCallum
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd.
ISBN 13: 9781845231866
Available: amazon. com
Rating: Recommended