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Just as water envelops us and carries us along, so this new collection by poet Ana Lisa de Jong, Bodies of Water, promises to be immersive and moving, as well as resonant in how the keenly drawn insights in Ana Lisa's poetry correspond with our own life's journeying.
And it was while journeying through the South Island of Aotearoa-New Zealand, known to the Maori as 'Te Waipounamu - The Water of Greenstone', that Ana Lisa first felt the topography of her new collection take shape. From the melding of flora and fauna, lakes and oceans, mountains and plains, emerges poetry still carrying the taste of salt from the sea, or the blue clarity of glacial water, the lilting tune of the bellbird.
'Bodies of Water' however is not just a collection inspired by the natural world, it is also a story about us in all our humanity and diversity, how in our kinship with the environment is mirrored the intricacy and immensity of our own internal selves.
These are spiritually charged and enquiring poems which explore our enduring relationship with water, and the landscape that forms the bedrock of its evolution, and the rich heritage that is our birthright, as tangata-whenua, 'people of the land'.
This book is in the end a book about belonging- belonging to our turangawaewae (spiritual homes); belonging to one another and our whakapapa (lineage), both in our heritage and our environment; and belonging to ourselves within our own rich depths.
Finally it is also a book about belonging (as Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer puts it), to the 'immeasurable body of love', how in the wondrous works of our Creator God's hands we might perceive his heart towards us.
'A sublime merging of imminence and transcendence!'
Rashani Rea
