The water between us / Shara McCallum.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McCallum, Shara, 1972- author.

Series:

Pitt poetry series.

Pitt Poetry Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jamaican Americans--Poetry.

Jamaican Americans.

Mothers and daughters--Poetry.

Mothers and daughters.

Women immigrants--Poetry.

Women immigrants.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (97 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania : University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner. The Water Between Us is a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the exile's struggle to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country. The book also centers on other kinds of physical and emotional distances: those between mothers and daughters, those created by being of mixed racial descent, and those between colonizers and the colonized. Despite these distances, or perhaps because of them, the poems affirm the need for a multilayered and cohesive sense of self. McCallum's language is precise and graceful. Drawing from Anancy tales, Greek myth, and biblical stories, the poems deftly alternate between American English and Jamaican patois, and between images both familiar and surreal.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

I

In the Garden of Banana and Coconut Trees

Apple

Pleasant Hill

8 Hope Road

Poem Where My Mother and Father Are Absent

What I Saved

The Perfect Heart

Fruit

The Feast to Celebrate His Majesty's Birthday

First Rites

Mother,

The Awakening

jack mandoora me no choose none

II

What Lies Beneath

Debt

The Spell

The Evolution of Useful Things

poppies

What the Stories Teach

Dove

For you sweetheart,

Something Like Flying

The Remains

Darkling I Listen

III

May 1981

What I'm Telling You

Sunset on the Wharf

Losing Footing

What We Forget

Jamaica, 1978

Jamaica, October 18, 1972

Persephone Sets the Record Straight

Mother Love

untitled

What my mother taught me:

Lullaby

Discubriendo una Fotografía de Mi Madre

Yu no send. Me no come.

In my other life,

Seed

IV

the siren's defense

A Warning

Siren Isles

I Promise You This

Enough

The Sea Returns

The Daughter, Left

When I think of you,

Calypso

Apsara

Two Sides

The Fisherman's Wife

The Meeting

The Exchange

The Choice Made

The tragedy of the mermaid

What the Oracle Said

Acknowledgments.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822980766

0822980762

OCLC:

891385830