THE SHAPE OF CAUGHT WATER

reviewed by Art Goodtimes

March 2014

 

Few wait 30 years to publish their first book of poetry, especially an émigré San Franciscan with Santa Fe roots, who ran with the pack in the Poetry Flash world of the Sixties/Seventies Bay Area and its Renaissance lit scene. This poet joined the Cloud House street bards of the Mission. Knew North Beach and opened her own bookstore and poetry venue in the Duboce Triangle. Now she makes an adobe home of New Mexico with a writer husband and college-age daughter.

 

Robyn Hunt’s The Shape of Caught Water (Red Mountain Press, Santa Fe, 2013) may be a first book, but it’s not the product of youthful practice. Hers is a seasoned voice. Just the title catches us up short. These poems will be interrupting the flow of things -- grabbing a little of the uncatchable to see what shape can be made. They cup their hands in the quotidian rapids and trap what can be pulled out of the net of language -- how life feels, how it flashes a moment before it spills and is gone.

 

Traveling is a central trope of this collection. As it is for most of us. We are a driving culture. Restless. Picking up roots and relocating to places where we find ourselves “alone with our sentences.” On a journey to recollect the moving forward and away that is our modern path. And that way leads through intersections, Bob Dylan at the wheel, traveling mandolins, Eve in Paris, too close tailgates, a man on a bridge in California, nightmare streets, summer swims, and days riding the miraculous animal. We watch a daughter driving, hear “wheels thrum over ridged linoleum.”

 

 Life is on the move. It’s persistent like water. Only curling into eddies and side streams as it gets caught and held. Robyn opens her book of illusory lyrics and lays them before us like a fresh-caught string of rainbows. Gives us enough narrative to hint at place, embed the images in the clay of Santa Fe, the West coast. But her images leap and swirl, bunch and bump, toss themselves across chasms. They mean one thing, and then slip into something else. Elusive as nibbles on the line.

 

 In this mature collection she hammers together “porches that lean one against another.” Grows restless with “arguments like foreplay.” Makes us party to ”lips of truancy” that “ignore night’s instruction.” With her as guide we visit “a widow’s house heavy with keepsakes.” Learn that “this life is made from scratch and prayer.” Voyeurs, we watch ”wrists tied to the bed frame of obligation.” Explore the “expansive torso of the imagination.”

 

Robyn fishes shapes out of the flow -- images and memories, dreams and ashes. We tag along and marvel at the depth of the current, the pull of the song. Like the best women writing today, Hunt is fiercely honest. Her poetry uses a marvelously American cadence. Never static. But often staccato. Elliptic. And then rolling along eloquent. She makes lists. Takes us from one deep pool to another, from anger to pleasure, from longing to remorse. Images linger and fade.

 

This is a brilliant book. Like the works of my friend Michael Daley of the Pacific Northwest. It isn’t a quick read. Nor always an easy one. What of the invisible gets caught and seen depends almost on how much time one spends, swimming in its waters. But the rewards are great. The shapes invigorating. This is a book to take with you, sit beside a stream and ponder. The more you read, the more it will come to mean.

 

Highly recommended.

 

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