Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals

Donalee Moulton-Barrett was a writer and editor in Halifax.

Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals, by Phyllis Webb, is a firequick movement through place and time — through the here and now, the what-has-been and the what-will-be. It is a motion without beginning or end, sweeping the reader from image to image, from insight to insight. It is a dance the reader will never forget.

A ghazal, as Doug Beardsley explains in a review at the conclusion to Water and Light, “is an 8th century eastern lyric whose theme is generally love and wine, and whose form varies from five couplets, all upon the same rhyme.” Webb, of course, does not adhere rigidly to either the form or the thematic constraints, hence the “anti ghazals” of the title.

Most of the collection, however, does rely on the use of couplets, and this adds to the speed and urgency of what Webb has to say. It allows for a patterned, fast-paced movement from line to line, section to section, almost like the swaying motion of a train that soon becomes part of the movement of the passengers.

In essence, we are Phyllis Webb’s passengers, and we follow her through the intimate, the global, the particular, the everyday, and in “Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti Ghazals,” the first of the collection’s five divisions, actually witness the creation of the poems we’re now reading: “A song preserved from childhood, Meadowlark’s, / mocks faintly now from the netting-fields of Lansdowne. / Muttering and casting about each morning / for the secret heart of a poem.”

The least effective of the five divisions is “Frivolities.” Here the frequent repetition of words, the frequent play on words, is strained: “Reserved books. Reserved land. Reserved flight. / And still property is theft.”

Overall, however, the passage of time and place in Water and Light isa rhythmic and fluid step into the poetic vision of Phyllis Webb.