In and Out of Rough Water takes its title from the rocky Pacific coast where sea lions forage in vigorous waves. Landscapes and weather provide persistent stimuli for the poems in this book. Included among the book’s four sections are two sequences: Nothing Is Given moves between wilderness and city in its meditations about poetics and loss, while Wheel of Orion makes a wintry sojourn in the high desert country of central Oregon. In a variety of open and shaped forms, these poems ponder the meanings of memory, fear, and acceptance amid the harsh loveliness of life.
Jayne Marek’s In and Out of Rough Water presents us with an acutely apprehended Poetics of Place and Loss in which wisdom is hard-won but also deeply celebrated. In groups of individual lyric poems as well as a masterful lyric sequence, Nothing is Given, reminiscent of Roethke’s journey across the North American continent, this work grows in power as we traverse the contours of the poet’s inner landscape. More than the eye with its parallax / of encroachment // and calculation, we are held across the drift of time in a beneficent thrall of language and observation, and we find illumination in and out of these linguistic waters.
-Carolyne Wright, American Book Award, Blue Lynx Prize, National Translation Award, author of A Change of Maps and Seasons of Mangoes & Brainfire
What our feet can grip, / we may not see. So move, writes Jayne Marek, in her full-length debut, In and Out of Rough Water. And in and out of the rough places she moves, fluidly, assuredly, with an eye that inhabits the natural world and an ear that illuminates the beauty of the barely heard. This is a poetry of the body, in which the poet’s feet root her in a force the body knows infinitely more than the mind alone can grip. She includes the reader, in her generous vision, as participant and not simply observer. Marek’s lovely poems, her intricate eye and ear, are a pleasure to behold!
-George Kalamaras, Former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016), author of Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck and The Mining Camps of the Mouth
