Water Between Us (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Shara McCallum (Author)

Book Description

Series: Pitt Poetry Series | Publication Date: October 15, 1999

1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner. Shara McCallum is the eighteenth winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, one of the nation's most prestigious awards for a first book of poetry.

The Water Between Us is a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the exile's struggle to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country. The book also centers on other kinds of physical and emotional distances: those between mothers and daughters, those created by being of mixed racial descent, and those between colonizers and the colonized. Despite these distances, or perhaps because of them, the poems affirm the need for a multilayered and cohesive sense of self. McCallum's language is precise and graceful. Drawing from Anancy tales, Greek myth, and biblical stories, the poems deftly alternate between American English and Jamaican patois, and between images both familiar and surreal.

Starrett Poetry Prize winners are published as part of the Pitt Poetry Series, which was founded in 1968 by the University of Pittsburgh Press to publish the best in contemporary American poetry. Since 1978 Ed Ochester has edited the series, and he serves as final judge of the Starrett competition. In 1990 American Bookseller pronounced the Pitt Poetry Series the first among five "outstanding" university press series in the field of poetry.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“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’.”
--Boston Review

“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.”
--Poetlore

“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.”
—Smartish Pace

About the Author

McCallum was raised in Jamaica and the United States by Afro-Jamaican and Venezuelan parents. She did her undergraduate work at the University of Miami, completed an M.F.A. at the University of Maryland, and has just finished a Ph.D. in Poetry and African American and Caribbean Literature from Binghamton University in New York. In 1996, while still a graduate student, she won the Academy of American Poets Prize, and the following year she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published in several anthologies and literary journals, including Beyond the Frontier: Contemporary African American Poetry, Antioch Review, Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Verse, among others. She is on the M.F.A. faculty at the University of Memphis and lives in Tennessee.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (October 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822957108
• ISBN-13: 978-0822957102
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #208,399 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A work of grace and feeling, December 2, 1999

By 

Colin Channer (the author of Waiting In Vain) (Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Water Between Us (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

McCallum explores her relationship to her homeland and her parents with neither bitterness nor sentimentality, and has chosen, instead, to find her salvation in the beauty of verse. "Water Between Us" is one of the best collections of the year. McCallum is the mistress of the image.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When the book arrived I sat down and read it in one night., May 31, 2000

By 

Kimberly Martz (Phenix City, AL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Water Between Us (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Then I picked it up again, and gave myself an entire week to read it. After two readings, I was still caught up in Ms. McCallum's amazing poems. Now I am on my third reading of the book, and I don't see how I won't continue to read it, over and over again. Ms. McCallum has a wonderful, tight rein on her writing -- plain, yet vivid, images; strong language that speaks to the mind and the heart. She's a breath of fresh air, something anyone who enjoys poetry will appreciate. Pick it up, and you won't ever put it down.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shara McCallum's Water Between Us, December 11, 2002

By 

Matthew S Johnston (South Bend, IN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Water Between Us (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

there was my mother
cooking cornmeal porridge,
plantains, and callaloo for later,
my father's guitar notes,
streaming in from the garden,
to hold her singing,
his music, breathing,
lifting leaves
that would collect and stir
at his feet, my mother's
clapping hands, bells jingling
on her ankles.

(lns. 12-24 of "In the Garden of Banana and Coconut Trees")

This is the language, the imagery, of Shara McCallum in her collection of poetry, The Water Between Us. Hers is the poetry of island, family, love, and loss. Taken as a whole, the poems portray life from the perspective of a Jamaican woman, one whose experience has been funny, tragic, disturbing, and beautiful.
Throughout the collection, McCallum's language is clear and accessible. This clarity does not lie in simplicity, however, for there is a subtlety to the way she approaches her subjects. She is a storyteller, and her style is of mystery, not insurmountable mystery, but a mystery that gives the reader satisfaction when images, story, emotion, and message merge as one. For instance, her father's cancer, in "Darkling I Listen," is not addressed head on, but treated in a round-about manner as a subject too painful for words like `cancer' to describe. The result is an emotional epiphany for the reader, one that captures the essence of the experience.
This approach is particularly effective in her treatment of the pain in her life, which extends far beyond her father's sickness. The pain she feels in her relationship with her mother permeates the whole of the book, and the reader experiences the awkward discomfort of distance between mother and daughter.
The thrust of the book, happily, is not strictly loss and sadness. There is a playfulness to much of her poetry, particularly in "Calypso," where the grand western hero Odysseus is hilariously reduced to an enraptured white man, the beach fling of a young Jamaican woman. This happiness extends as a strain throughout the book, flowing through joys of music, foods, island life, and daughterhood, offsetting the tales of family distance and loss.
As a whole, McCallum's poetry provides a complete picture of life drawn from the colorful formative experiences of an intriguing woman. Her story, the joy and sorrow, the contentment and loss, conveyed in flowing, elegant verse, is beautiful, and should not be missed.