Water Quality
Clear, liquid-voiced poems that shimmer through lakes, oceans, and bloodstreams and ask: What does water want?
I find my bearings by clouds of moon jellies / afloat beneath my anchored boat, / pulsing the sea’s bright night, / their milky way, unfurling.
In these lush and vivid poems water gloves a swimmer’s body, is “satin, yes, viscous. Albumen, vernix, newborn slick.” It “rinses gai lan – bright green in a silver bowl” in Hong Kong or hibernates in the Pacific Northwest “under a silky pelt / of rain. People-less. Days, months of this / hiss, softness breaking cliffs.”
Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool simmering through a family’s veins, water is the main character here. It can be turbid, the amniotic colour of spittle, or, in a time of drought, “brilliant beads.” As “a stream flushed over granite,” water seems to want “so little it shares another’s colour,” yet here, it gets our full and necessary attention.
Rich with vibrant language and intensity, these poems sizzle in lyric form, monologues, elegy, and haibun. Water Quality calls on us to consider that our very survival is at stake unless we make a vow to this vital element to cherish it as we would a partner.
“The poems in Cynthia Woodman Kerkham’s Water Quality wash over the reader’s psyche like a blessedly cool drink poured down a parched throat. Alive with a keenly attentive inquiry, driven as much by generosity and wonder as by a muted rage, these poems, delicate and fierce by turns, rinse the grit from our eyes, allowing us to better see what water, in all its forms, is to us - and what, to our peril, we let run down the drain.” Anita Lahey, author of While Supplies Last and Fire Monster
“Cynthia Woodman Kerkham’s strong second collection of poetry addresses the fragile business of loss and the hard work of retrieval: how to save a small lake, survive an expatriate childhood, guide children into a world on the brink. In the face of a world on fire, she tenderly describes love. In the overwhelm of mid-century Hong Kong, she defines simple moments. In the complexity of disaster, she chooses life. Written with a reverence often reserved for only the beautiful, she finds beauty in otherness, the unknown. With meticulous research and precise language, she gives us her whole poetic heart, haunted, sifted with science. ‘The stars call down in ancestral whispers,’ she writes. She is a woman sitting in the vast night, conjuring starlit, lyrical poems; she will capture your heart.” Arleen Paré, author of Lake of Two Mountains and Absence of Wings
“These poems, like the waters they hold, are satin, albumen, and mammalian. Cynthia Woodman Kerkham neither shies from the wet waters nor the cold truths of human-made changes. Here are poems rich in memory and moments that nearly devastate with their questions, their profoundly embodied lines. From lake, to pool, to Hong Kong’s 'viscous seas,' with moth, mouse, spider, and bullfrog, Water Quality pauses and holds the reader, moment by moment, in its liquid song.” Yvonne Blomer, author of *The Last Show on Earth and editor of Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds *
"The bracing density and directness of [Woodman Kerkham’s] language is matched by a brisk, no nonsense attitude. She doesn’t waste words setting a scene, but matter-of-factly juxtaposes scenes, events, and emotional responses in a series of notes and speculations. The end result is an impressive, well-considered, coherent, and powerful book whose emotional and linguistic subtleties reward frequent re-reading." The British Columbia Review
- Commended, DC Reid Poetry Book Prize, Victoria Book Prize Society 2025