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Water Lines: New and Selected Poems Water Lines: New and Selected Poems By Luci Shaw Eerdmans, 97 pp. $18

Whenever Luci Shaw puts together a new poetry collection it's like a drink of cool, fresh water for a thirsty land — the "land" being the artistic community within the evangelical church. Evangelicals do not have a glorious heritage when it comes to the arts. We have been suspicious of whatever can't be nailed down; we produce charts and diagrams to explain the Book of Revelation, depend on commentaries to understand the parables, and trust systematic theologies to be sure God behaves himself.

Luci Shaw has long been a voice crying in this evangelical wilderness. Hers is evangelical, but not evangelistic, poetry. She is not attempting to win arguments but simply to shine light upon the truth in the world around us.

Her previous collection, The Green Earth: Poems of Creation, thematically points to the natural world, and through it shows God's hand. This new book focuses on water in its diverse forms — raindrops, snowflakes, fog, cloud, dew, ice, mountain glaciers, creeks, lakes, oceans, "bathtub water scrolling down the drain," and even the spittle of Christ. Geographically she takes us with her from Cape Cod's Atlantic to British Columbia's Pacific coast; from cool Colorado mountain streams to the insect heat of Texas; and from snorkelling in the Bahamas to the rough, rocky coast of Wales.

Some of the poetry here has appeared in earlier books. Shaw has carefully selected, and in many cases revised, her poems for their appearance in Water Lines. The changes are usually minor (punctuation, line breaks, an occasional word), but they provide a window into the mind of the poet. This reminds me of what French writer Paul Valéry once said: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." Here Luci Shaw picks up again some of the fine gems she has scattered, and polishes them further — similar to the sea's continual polishing of the stones on the beach. One poem from her 1985 book Postcard from the Shore, entitled "Home Movie," has here been updated to be called "Vacation video," using a more-contemporary image.

One of my favorite poems from The Green Earth suitably reappears here, slightly altered. It is called "Raining", and captures the beautiful sights and sounds of a heavy rain:

… Thin ropes
of crystal beads (their shining drops
each singing its own syncopated sound
into the pail we set to catch the drips)
have raised the level so the pitch
climbs higher every hour, in the round
tin bucket, till it's full up to the brim

This is nature poetry that follows the tradition handed down from Wordsworth and Coleridge, through Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Frost. Shaw invites the reader into her world, where we can rest and reflect; her sequence of beachcombing poems, near the end of the book, intelligently shares the leisure of such activity.

Her laundry poem "Evaporation" (notice the water image) reminds me of the whimsical Richard Wilbur poem, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," where he says "Outside the open window / The morning air is all awash with angels." In her poem, Shaw laments the change to an electric dryer:

The air behind the house
is empty of epiphanies, apparitions.
Gone is the iron-fresh smell of damp linens
praying their vapor to the sun.

Prayer, in fact, often finds its way into her lines. In the opening poem she's noticing falling leaves and snow, and rain on window glass: "As if the mystery of existence were becoming / visible." She makes us envision her "small gasps of prayer, / meant to rise, not fall." Elsewhere she compares great blue herons to "gray praying prophets, heralds / of something Other." Another poem begins with the poet and her friend (writer Madeleine L'Engle) in a cathedral chapel: "Both of us kneel, then wait."

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November (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47