Water Is the First World

Betsy Struthers is a poet and novelist and the author of Found: A Body.

As its title indicates, this poetry collection focuses on the natural
world and its interplay with the human cycle of loving, birthing, and
child-rearing. Poems invoking the spirit and stories of immigrant
grandmothers mesh seamlessly with others that explore the relationship
between mothers and children in a line of experience, of identification
with the earth: “We are a matroyshka Katie / the ones we have come
from / you and me and all that will / come from you and me / and all
that shall go on / new hands in new mitts Katie / long after we are held
stiff / and still like dolls / in the mother’s frozen body” (from
“matroyshka on valentine’s day”).

The book is organized in unnamed sections that follow a certain logical
chronology from poems of displacement, women on the verge of madness,
through a love affair consummated in travel to Europe, to poems in the
persona of various historical mother figures (these being the least
successful, perhaps because they seem the least grounded in the
collection). From this point the book gains in strength and insight as
the poet reflects the birthing and growing of her children, seeing them
and herself in a seamless interplay with history and the land. There are
some quite wonderful poems here, poems that capture the unique bond of
mother and child, of the mother’s awe-full wonder at the child’s
growth away from her into adulthood. As in the poem quoted above, the
language remains natural and spare, illuminating the everyday with that
spark of connection in which all the common events of life become
suddenly extraordinary.