The more I read Broken by Water the more I find myself stopping after one or two poems, putting down the book and saying, sometimes out loud—wow, these are really great poems! (I know, I know—I can hear you saying along with my old teachers: “What the hell kind of a way is that to start a review? Tone it down already.”) Still—one after another these poems carve out a masterpiece of praise. Each one slides neatly inside its columnar sheath—the form is at one and the same time action and observation which delivers real experience as each swing of a line brings its own tension, ships us out onto the wave pattern of the Salish Sea. The best “praise of place” poems give poets a chance to step out of the poem or to be a minor character. Yet the praises here deliver a poet’s range between joy in the paradise of the sea and terror in unexpectedly striking land.
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