In Black Bear Country Maureen Waters 9780988637603 Books
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The bears, which appear in the title poem, are intended to suggest unpredictability, the mysterious and dangerous aspects of experience as well as the possibility of love. The poems are rooted in a changing landscape ranging from the Hudson River Valley to Manhattan, and further back in time, to the West coast of Ireland, from which the writer's parents emigrated. Arriving in New York in the twenties, they brought memories of famine and civil war as well as strong cultural values. The writer is haunted by their sense of another world, particularly after the death of her son. The poems attempt to work out a reconciliation between radically different perspectives, knowing there is no satisfactory way of doing so. Yet, Seamus Heaney has observed, "As long as the coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counterweighting function. It becomes another truth to which we have recourse, before which we can know ourselves in a more fully empowered way." "The hypnotic effect of Waters' work is the grace with which she moves from ordinary time into realms of eternity, from details of everyday life in specific geographic settings into the colored shadows of memory." ―Susan Cahill, Phd., author of Hidden Gardens of Paris, The Smiles of Rome and Women & Fiction "Waters' poetry exhibits arresting yet familiar imagery that is deeply inflected emotionally, together with an impressive technical sophistication." ―Susan Zimmerman, Professor Emerita of English, Queens College, CUNY. Editor of Shakespeare Studies "I like the tang of authenticity in Waters' work, the sense of lived-in, felt experience offered in a plainspoken, unaffected way," ―Eamon Grennan, Emeritus Professor of English, Vassar College. He is the author of Out of Sight, Still Life with Waterfall and Facing the Music Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century.
In Black Bear Country Maureen Waters 9780988637603 Books
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In Black Bear Country Maureen Waters 9780988637603 Books Reviews
In her book of poems, In Black Bear Country, Maureen Waters shares with readers her struggle to find herself in worlds and times scarred by grevious brutality, loss, and disillusion. The sense of wonder on this journey spoke to my head and heart. Here is a poet who realizes that memory is a storehouse of inventions and has searched the possibilities with more awareness than many of my historian colleagues. Describing " the melodious cry of a young eagle/ bewildered by the impulse to fly/ beyond the familiar nesting trees" , as in her empathy with the feared bears, in exposing vulnerability, she sees the interdependence governing all nature and life on earth.
Opened at random each of the five sections in this complex meditation details fear, fury, brutality, and greed. Yet the poet's Irish beginnings and Bronx childhood takes us to another place. The poignancy of just political anger and resistance is transformed into a narrative of the love and light gleaned from past landscapes and vision. Beneath the perpetual circularity of oppression, the direction driving the poet's lyrical voice binds the personal to a vision of universal commitment, faith in understanding, and the courage to recognize different realities and rights.
Dolores Greenberg
Emerita Prof. of History and Environmental Studies,
Hunter College and the Graduate School,
City University of New York
It is in the appearance by disappearance of the red hair that the mystery of the book lies. The gaze drawn there again and again is refused, this obscure object of desire. Even when the ‘red-winged blackbirds’ repeat the iteration, ‘she will not look.’ There are drives along country by-ways, feasts on raspberries (‘with black coffee’), cold springs in the hemlock forest, and always, doorways that speak mysteriously where ‘he lingers at thresholds.’ What do they open to? Surely it is not to say ‘Speech is not enough.’ Or, as the grandfather puts it, “no need to speak/ ill of the dead.†For now, the uncanniness of this earth is enough. The poet is protected since above, ‘benevolent spirits roam the skies.’ There are angels and children’s secrets at Christmas and Mozart sung in Latin. But also, a forgetfulness, brought by snow when whole cities ‘would vanish under blazing sheets/ of snow.’ It covers the inheritance of birth, puts the declarative back into the subjunctive, and defers an understanding of the poet’s sense of definition, ‘where each insect/ has its flower, or seems to.’ The perpetual postponement in which ‘nothing seems as it truly was’ is her great strength. It brings a patience, a wait, that allows ever-deepening layers of ‘death’s obscurities’ to announce themselves, be glimpsed, and sent to return to that realm where ‘even the ghosts had vanished.’ This yields a peace without resolution.
The true poet's gift for precise language and an authoritative tone sounds in the title poem of Maureen Waters's In Black Bear Country
Tracks are rare in the high meadow.
They prefer pond shrubbery rich with
blueberries. In spring they may toddle up to
the front door, curious, uncertain what to do.
Driven from maternal dens, they are
unaccustomed to loneliness.
Waters has perfect control of rhythm here she knows just where to end each line and how to vary enjambment with an end-stop line. Brilliantly, she doesn't use the word "bear" anywhere in this poem that describes in such elegant language the bears she sees signs of around her house and by "pond shrubbery." Although I must admit I have very little interest in bears myself, I love this poem, because Waters characterizes bears by their evident habits -- not the high meadow but pond shrubbery, also "standing at / the edge of things" -- and by what she infers about the interior,subjective bear they are "curious, uncertain," and "unaccustomed to loneliness." The details of observation acknowledge the psychological dimension of the animal. By the end of the poem, the bear by night has further, more mysterious qualities. The very title of the poem implies that the poet lives in the bear's territory, that the land belongs to the bear, not the poet; looking out at the bear from indoors, she attempts to understand him.
Waters is just as precise when she writes about history. The poem "Ancestral Houses" nods at Yeats's poem of that title (a section of his long poem "Meditations in time of Civil War") but revises Yeats's vision of the Irish "big house." Here Waters remembers the time her father, a servant on the estate of the aristocratic Gore-Booth family in Sligo, held the heir to the estate hostage. This subtly political poem makes no explicit comment on the Irish War of Independence, but the final verse paragraph says everything in a brilliant vignette
Gore-Booth stood by an open window
unbound but pledged as hostage
to a 16-year-old Volunteer.
Shifting his rifle, Father offered tea
on that late autumn afternoon;
measured the cool authority of the man
against his certain ruin.
Whether she writes about animals, her family, memories of the Irish-American Bronx of the 1950s, or the sunset "high over Spuyten Duyvil," Waters writes with the precision, confidence, and authority of a true poet. She is one to keep your eye on.
Lucy McDiarmid
Marie-Frazee Baldassarre Professor of English
Montclair State University
The poems in In Black Bear Country evoke the pain and losses of the real world. Yet it is the very context of the real and mortal world that opens the poetry to dimensions of beauty and eternal mercy, the gifts of time itself. It's a counterpoint at once visionary and unflinchingly insistent on the sorrow of the human condition. As much as the thematic content - there are many recognitions in these poems - it is the music and rhythms of the language that deliver and sustain the very moving harmonies of meaning.
Maureen Waters is an Irish American writer, who started out in the Bronx; reading her, however, I see and hear most clearly the lights and shadows of Ireland's northwest, that place of tragicomic history, landscape, and literature.
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