Water under Water
Charles Adés Fishman
Casa de Snapdragon LLC
ISBN Number: 978-0984053025

Reviewer: Janelle Adsit


          Reach the “underness,” push through, enter—these are the acts of Water under Water. The poems are of their environment. The poet locates himself by the sun. Then he creates a quiet space where he—and the reader with him—can attend to what’s beneath his—and their—feet. An author of several books and recipient of many accolades, including the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, Fishman is a poet who has dwelled—in both senses of the word—on the varied surfaces of this planet.

          The collection’s first epigraph from Sandra Critelli highlights the magnificence of water. Then Fishman commences to explore the splendor of water through his own poems, perhaps most notably in “Mother of Silence”:

Enter this rain of ions, photons of tide
And body, your eyes darkly glimmering
In the dark trough in the plosive buzz
Of ocean: your eyes and their sadness, wife…

          A poet of the detail, Fishman adeptly distinguishes fine gradations of sound and color. With a vibrant image, he transports readers' eyes from the page to the broader world. With Fishman serving as a guide, one begins to see vines as “green veins simmering/ in the earth’s succulent body” (“Moss”). Fishman also seeks a precise intimacy with the non-human. He writes in the collection’s first poem, “Loon Hunting on Newry Mountain”:

The ascent glittered with mica—
glassy muscovite layered in dogeared “books”
and lepidolite, lavender, but smelling of time
not lilacs—and watermelon tourmaline
teased us into eating rock.

We learned that water wore no pinions
but swiftness and, under the light strength of white pine,
translucence: always deceitful, promising clairvoyance
at each arabesque and ripple.

          Of equal importance in this book are the human self and the environment which the body inhabits. The body serves as a reference point: “The pond was a mystery almost as deep/ as my body,” Fishman concludes in “At Browning’s Pond.” And yet, Fishman ably conceives of a world absent of humans: “Shadows exist without people,” he writes in “Far into Vermont.” Fishman strives to have his viewpoint become less specifically his own; in other words, he pursues a less anthro-centric understanding, a more varied and transcendent viewpoint.

          Fishman pursues inter-subjectivity. Through metaphor, mind and surroundings become one and the same: He writes in “At Browning’s Pond,” “My mind was a swamp of feelings:/ soft black mud, standing water.” Later, in “Flying,” the speaker and his companion become "monarchs/ of all we obey.” Fishman’s subjects—swamp, butterfly, and human alike—are neither isolated nor entirely discrete. Rather, trans-identification is possible; one species can experience another’s way of abiding in the world.

          Empathy for another’s experience of the world is clearly one of Fishman’s effective devices. In achieving this central element of the book, Fishman’s encounters with animals are studied. “Geese inspect me…/ I admire their savage beaks,” he writes in “Romance.” Fishman inquires how one animal shapes another’s experience. He discovers the connections between things—animate and not—that compose our planet. The poet emphasizes the inextricable link between himself and his environment: “Light laid its spectral eggs on my forehead, on my green/ and sprouting shoulders” (“Moss”).

          For Fishman, light is living. The living are everywhere. In a sense, even the rock is alive, as Fishman notes in “Far into Vermont”:

every shadow here is the imprint
of something living, even the moss-and-lichen-
covered rock that roots down to the core
of the begotten planet.

          Amid such carefully found knowledge, the hackneyed passages in this book become especially noticeable. Words such as “mystery,” “death,” “flight," and “heart” are predictably applied and overused. Common associations—sleep and death, freedom and flight—remain routinely linked.

          Especially when writing to or about other people, Fishman often resorts to the worn-out expression. For example, addressing his life companion in “The Dream,” he writes, “I knew nothing less than death/ could break us, that death wouldn’t/ break us.” Later, he writes to his daughter in “Light in the Afternoon,” “yet I think you are a rose    after all:/ that you are strong-willed but fragile/ and need a net of loving friends to catch you// when you fall.” Such pop-song clichés are redeemed, however, by the degree of intimacy the poet allows the reader. On these printed, and therefore public, pages, the reader holds the poet’s personal missives, written to Fishman’s friends and family. In fact, the notes in the back of the book, in addition to providing certain clarifications, include references to many of these people.

          This book pulls from real lives. Some poems describe occasions and are dated with month and year. This book also inhabits real settings, including Greece, Spain, Ireland, Senegal, Gambia, the Central African Republic, the James Bay Wilderness in Canada, New Orleans, Wyoming, and Virginia.

          As might be assumed from his familiarity with the globe, Fishman understands himself relatively and in context of his surroundings. In “Three Boys Cycling,” he’s politically aware and self-conscious about his prejudice.

at our property’s rim, their dark faces
were revealed, and I felt a wave surge over me
like grief or fear. The boys were seeking help

in a strange country of neatly trimmed lawns
and white skin and they, too, were on edge.

…

It was a long way home for them and I regretted
my meager welcome, how I’d hesitated

to fetch the tools they needed. I knew then
it was fear I felt and not yet grief.

          Fishman is reliably contemplative towards the people he encounters. The third section of the book, titled “Quiet River,” offers compassionate portraits of figures called by name—Shanti the dog; Bobby, Laura, and Richard, a family struck by the “white lightning/ of alcohol” (“In the Path of Lightning”); and a history-holder named Raymond Martin. With an equal degree of empathy, Fishman considers those things that he can’t label with an individualized name—rock, light, white pine.

          Employing particulars and a keen eye, Fishman reminds us that the world is vast and intricate. One puts down this book with a deeper sense of the sublime. Fishman succeeds through lines that reflect “a nearly vertical planet/ orbiting a dead sun,/ a drizzling emptiness” ("Moss”). As he sustains this panoramic view, Fishman allows readers to co-occupy moss-covered spaces. He is an apostle—an ardent and pioneering advocate—of the senses. With well-felt descriptions, these poems fill the perceiving body even as they remind, as written in "Shanti," “There is no lid to the body leaking out your life."