The Water Between Us

W.E.B. Dubois speaks of ever feeling one's twoness, two warring bloods, two consciousnesses in the same body. McCallum's amazing first book brings this 'twoness' into brilliant focus. But its triumph is in how it enables us to perceive the invisible spaces between—the gaps in knowledge and history, the agonizing separations and distances, the losses that can't be spoken and, in the end, are untranslatable. McCallum is one of the most exciting new voices in poetry today.

In taut lyrics of landscape and loss, amid "Trees my tongue had forgotten," Shara McCallum creates a Bildungsroman that comingles the personal with the archetypal. Cast out of the garden of Jamaica as a child, she bears its tropical scent and lush residue, its salty language and sexual sting, through the laborious process of becoming: "say home /see what stays. The Water Between Us is a tough, beautiful book. Shara McCallum could be the spiritual daughter of Derek Walcott and Lucille Clifton.

Shara McCallum reminds me that there is a fresh and compelling body of literature emerging from the Caribbean that is effectively bringing dynamism, grace, and beauty to world poetry. In McCallum we witness the closest thing to a marriage between Lucille Clifton and Lorna Goodison. Her desire for truth-telling is tempered by a tenderness of sentiment, a lively capacity for irony and a facility with forms that are natural and effortlessly executed. These, quite clearly, are the strengths we expect from a poet of significant promise. The high quality of McCallum's poems is consistent throughout this collection—never flagging, always surprising and yet, always rewardingly accessible.

The poems in The Water Between Us work to a compelling cumulative effect. . . . McCallum's poems investigate childhood through the speaker's engagement in the excavation of a literal and figurative prelapsarian garden. . . The poems possess a layered allusiveness; they are both discovery and invention. This work incorporates fairy tale and myth to enlarge upon and dramatize its narrative, which is rendered in simple, clear, almost transparent language. . . . This is an arresting new voice, it sings like a 'surf rupturing herself again and again'.

Shara McCallum is well launched. Her first book, The Water Between Us is beautiful, a weak word to describe such strong poems but beautiful they are, sad and happy, amusing and sobering in their telling of identity, of grief and of pride. She has chosen wisely not to footnote or explain the words peculiar to her culture. She leaves the reader to learn from the rhythm of them all that matters, to absorb them as a child would her own language that leans not on grammar but on sound. She may be young but she is far from immature.

It's happening on the real when you hit the last page in a collection of poetry and you're ready to stomp, scream, and holler like a three-year-old because you want more. . . . One of the brightest books of poetry crafted in recent years.

McCallum's poems are startling in their breadth of experience and language . . . [they] wrestle with her own history as well as with our accepted history, and while her answers are not always pleasant, they are never without truth stolen from lies, beauty wrenched from pain.