As Water Moves

The largest section of As Water Moves made up mostly of reconstructed or remembered events in the poet's life, necessarily isolated from one another to support either narrative or argumentative coherence or both. Towards the end of that section ("One Lane Road") and in the "Letters From Kepler" section he ventures into the broader question of what life might be. Life is difficult to describe for him, but it is likened to water or air, the mind's attention, love, time, rushing to get a train, in that it flows. As far as we can tell, the flowing never stops. So, the poems in this book rely heavily on specific encounters with the smaller elements of the cosmos, but a few of them try, one might say, riding a bull, where like a bull rider, the poet, is bucked off. The section called "Manhattan" celebrates Mitchell's love of the city that never sleeps. The "Prairie Warp" section continues his long interest in identifiable biotas (Adirondacks, tundra in "Half/Mask", and The Everglades in "The One Good Bite in the Saw-Grass Plant"), in this case the vast ocean bottom known as the North American Prairie, as encountered in Canada's Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan. Finally, the "Letter to Maira Azam" is a kind of poem rarely written now, a letter of thanks to a living stranger.