A Girl in Water

Barbara Edelman

These poems swim the depths-sometimes murky, sometimes shimmering-of our complicated relationships to family, lovers and ourselves. Along the way, Edelman’s precise, luminous language and ear for the song in a line set up elegant containers for the “furious. . leaps and slides” of a life. These are restless poems that tangle with loose ends and surprises, : “One {poem} will kiss you deeply,/teeth and all. . while another punches you in the stomach. . they sting you with loose pieces of yourself.” Yet a sturdy resilience emerges as the speaker manages a wry balance between contradictory perspectives; she is like the Lower Amazon paddlers, precarious in their dugout, in a hemisphere where “rivers run backwards and clouds/appear solid as mountains.” And as the swimmer in the title poem tirelessly grabs for elusive treasure on the lake bottom, we get hooked on her search. . get hooked/on the way she keeps diving/and rising. . ./ shoots up into air with her fist raised/hangs on like that to what’s left.”

Barbara Edelman teaches writing and literature at the University of Pittsburgh, and is Poet in Residence at the Ellis School, teaching poetry writing to grade school girls. Her awards include a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant for poetry, residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Scott Turow Award for short fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. Her one-act play “Charades” was produced as one of ten winners of the 1993 Pittsburgh New Works Festival. She has published poetry in journals nationally, among them Cimarron Review, 5 AM, Prairie Schooner and Poet Lore. In some of her past lives, she’s been an actor, a theatrical agent, and an instructor of English as a Second Language in Los Angeles.

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Excerpt

Intersection

I’m heading towards a school north
of Pittsburgh and above me stoplights
swing in wind, strung across a highway
that links together three dead mill towns.

                *

Years ago, a passenger, I watched stoplights
bounce from their thick black cords, as wind
reached in to us through rolled down windows.
That’s always an oddly lonely sight, I said.
Peculiar to America, said my friend.
They don’t hang lights like that anywhere else.

I felt us both suspended then. He
was peculiar to America. I thought
that he was lonely no matter where he went
and so was I. That each of us moved
and stopped in the places we stopped and
moved inside some precarious
belief in how we were supposed to live.

And then the light changed. And then
he went back to Tel Aviv, in a year
when the movement toward peace
in his region felt possible and huge.

                *

The light tips bottoms up inside its yellow
casement, the red lit shiny as a city I can’t
reach and I forget where I’m going
or what it is I’m meant to do there, while
above me the rules themselves destablize.