Floodwater
Connie Post
Glass Lyre Press
ISBN:  978-0-9840352-1-2

Reviewer: Ann Wehrman


          Poets write in wildly diverse styles, from the cheery limerick, to the reverent ode, to the heroic epic poem. In poetry, the medium often reflects the message, as well. In her collection of free verse, Floodwater, Connie Post writes freely, gently, and courageously about emotional pain—unflinching and unafraid to enter the inner rooms of awareness, even when she is unsure of the way out, whether suffering will ever result in peace or a greater understanding.

          In “Jaycee Lee Dugard Bore Children of Kidnapper Lived in Backyard,” Post writes,

She is alive

She will vomit the tar of night each morning
She will kneel at dawn
like a sacrament she can’t swallow

She is alive

She will stack her limbs
like dry wood
before she leaves a room
the termites already
feasting on her bones

. . .

the schizophrenic birds
will fly blind in the slanted sky

she will bend her neck and watch them
but no one else will notice

nor will they notice the tar leaking
from her mouth

          Reading Floodwater, one recalls Margaret Mitchell’s Atlanta gentry portrayed in Gone with the Wind, who, after the Civil War is lost, keep stiff upper lips as they sell their blue blood drop-by-drop, lace tea cozy-by-sterling tea set, for firewood, sugar, chicory, or a scrawny chicken. The poems recall the desperation of Moscow aristocrats when the Revolution struck, as shown in Dr. Zhivago when Zhivago steals scrap wood for the stove in the rooms he shares with Tonya and their small family, one tight suite of rooms in a mansion filled with rooms taken by “comrades” looking to betray anyone for their own advantage, in a mansion that before the war might have been the Zhivago family’s magnificent city home.

          Floodwater’s poems speak of profound loss and of the desire to enter, feel, and own an acute pain in order to find balance, to land, to ground in reality. Reading Floodwater, the reader’s defenses are stripped away without the reader knowing it. Post’s unassuming images remove barriers, revealing pain carried in everyday life, pain for which there often is no answer or antidote, no medicine available. The pain is brutally stated, yet with the utmost gentility, with quiet, direct, and frequently bleak honesty. The images and words stack and flow humbly, naturally, but then suddenly, as the reader begins to settle in comfortably, Post veers into uncharted territory, as in “Low Tide”:

you say it is the ocean’s fault
tell me often
how it stole gravity from you
but I am standing here
with sand pouring out of my mouth

putting myself under these rocks
trying to make you understand
this is the first moon
I ever loved

          Shades of Dvorak’s “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka, perhaps—the wildness inside one answers the moon’s brilliant call. Post understands, however, that in this world, the eager, sweet wildness within all too often meets with violence. In “Sierra Leone,”

the story of a rape of a ten-year-old girl
is told again
each time a shredded map
falls

. . .

I walk down the streets of my town
wondering where I might hide
if I were a young girl in Sierra Leone

. . .

someday finding her too, alone
as she rocks incessantly
sings
over and over
“dona nobis pacem”
in the dark

          People handle brutal pain and lost hope, the fall of their gods, the end of their worlds in different ways. Some become craven or cruel, some go mad (possibly all go mad at some point, but perhaps in different ways). Some retain their inner beauty, like bruised flowers in the gutter. Post’s speakers display an inner refinement, character capable of withstanding unendurable and disorienting emotional pain, all the while remaining braced, waiting for that moment when it will be possible to breathe again and rest for a moment; i.e., the collection’s opening and title poem, “Floodwater”:

All the rooms in the house
are flooding
but there is no water

. . .

we sink to the bottom,
grow gills
and swim past the lifeguard
who has forgotten
how to survive
in a room
with no air

          The oxymoron is simply stated; the speaker drowns despite the absence of water, and now absence of air, as well. The reader “sinks to the bottom” with the speaker, in stark, chilled sympathy, Ophelia on a dry lakebed, preserved in a world without air.

          Post writes of this moral and psychic pain both while immersed in quotidian matters and standing observantly outside the experience of everyday time, as in “Not Like the Rest”:

I have never had a pedicure
I do not want anyone else
hovering around my feet
- to come close enough
to smell the blood I have walked upon
from the roads of centuries passed
I am too afraid, they will find
ancient bone fragments between my toes,
realize I am not from this time

. . .

I avoid them
on the way to the shower
but traveling back
I fall – and later must explain
to the mute man at the grocery counter
why my hands
are burned beyond recognition

          In Floodwater, Post makes a significant statement: these well-crafted, resonant, and universally significant poems urge a reader to take that often frightening step into the aching regions of her own life and to face what she finds there, whether or not the pain can yet be healed.