Duke University Alumni Magazine

slim volume from a small regional press often signals that you are about to be introduced to poems that, while earnest, are unready, hurried into print by an over-anxious author. Nothing could be further from the truth in the case of Florence Nash's Crossing Water. The poems in this book show the good effect of long patience, of language that has been lived with and loved.

     One of the most striking qualities of these poems is their ordinary subject matter. That might sound like damning with faint praise, but it is not. In the age of ax-grinding poems--poems of political outrage, poems of sexual oppression, in short, poems more concerned with current headlines than with the deep currents of language--it is tremendously refreshing to come upon poems "about" watching a meteor shower at Jordan Lake or a son's broken leg. What Nash does so skillfully is show that dramatic subject matter is finally not what makes a poem of lasting value.

     In the poem about her son's "simple fracture," she uses the occasion of the recent injury to remember another visit to the emergency room. It's not big, life-threatening stuff, just a broken leg and some childhood stitches. She gets the long-distance call and pictures the young man "sagging off the playing field between two buddies...." ("Sagging" is indicative of the accuracy of observation Nash maintains throughout the book.) Then she remembers helping a young doctor hold down this same boy in an earlier incident:

Under hard disks of light
your small body jerked with pain,
with the new struggle not to cry.
You fastened your eyes wide onto mine,
clutched fistfuls of me like a baby
animal clinging to its mother's fur,
and my heart pumped hard as if
it could still wash through your
    translucent skin
into the jewel of you curled beneath it,
as if this surge of love could sluice
right through your bones and back
traveling no distance at all.

     She brings the poem back around to the distance of the beginning and collapses that distance at the same moment, capturing all the tensions that work a good parent.

     Good poems must be deeply felt, but depth of feeling alone isn't enough. Nash keeps the purple passages at bay with craft. The best accomplishment of that feat probably occurs in the poem "Going after lightwood." Lightwood is a vernacular term for a kindling with a high resin content. The remarkable thing about this poem, for me, was that I made it to the fifth stanza before I realized it was a sestina. A sestina is one of the most demanding poetic forms, with six six-line stanzas in which the same six end words repeat in a complex order. It was, I believe, Elizabeth Bishop who said, if you can get a reader past the third stanza before he or she notices the form, you've written a successful sestina.

     The "story" of the poem is of an outdoors man going out to retrieve a lightwood stump he's seen. As the end words--bank, light, quiet, woods, fear, and stump--subtly repeat, you feel, as the man must, how a landscape can settle into you. Successful sestinas are rare, and Nash should beam with pride at having written such a good one.

     While she demonstrates that she can handle a difficult form, Nash also shows that she knows how to use freer verse:

Copperhead
This morning
on the mossy path
that splits
our remnant patch
of wood
we came across
quite suddenly
coiled
where we stood
a fine big copperhead.
Danger
in a common script
scribbled on the ground.
Snake: Here.
Respectfully
we stepped around
and later said
how much we miss
a world where
what we have
to fear
appears forthright
and clear
as this.

     The poem lies thin and snake-like on the page and the rhymes--wood/stood, ground/ around, fear/clear, and particularly the hissing of "miss" and "this"--make what could have been a prosy statement sing.

     Crossing Water is a fine, quiet book full of good reading.