Customer Reviews

You Don't Miss Your Water: Poems (Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary)

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You Don't Miss Your Water, is a compact collection of twenty-one prose poems exploring his "ornery and cantankerous" father's illness and death. Beyond writing elegy, beyond "hospital deathbed" and "funeral home" poems, Eady attempts to untangle his father's less-than-angelic past--infidelities, bitterness toward a darker-skinned son, lies, secrets about a half-sister previously unknown to the family--while at the same time dealing with the uncomfortable errands of the immediate present...

Evenn while dealing with the confusion, anger and bitterness surrounding his father's death, Eady tempers these beautiful poems with honesty and affection...Throughout the book he weaves memory with the immediate discomforts of grief, writing his way clearly and without ornament through the lies and bitterness of his father's life. In doing so, Eady pulls off a fine book of poems, proving, as he closes the book, that "every hymn is a flare of longing, that the key to any heaven is language."

Cornelius Eady writes beautiful prose and poetry, subjects ranging from the hardships he faced while growing up to his love of dance. "You Don't Miss Your Water" is the tale of Eady exploring his past as he watches his father slowly die. Of all his published works this is the most well written and touching accounts from his personal history.