Maureen Waters

In Black Bear Country Maureen Waters

The bears, which appear in the title poem, are intended to suggest unpredictability, the mysterious and dangerous aspects of experience as well as the possibility of love. The poems are rooted in a changing landscape ranging from the Hudson River Valley to Manhattan, and further back in time, to the West coast of Ireland, from which the writer's parents emigrated. Arriving in New York in the twenties, they brought memories of famine and civil war as well as strong cultural values. The writer is haunted by their sense of another world, particularly after the death of her son. The poems attempt to work out a reconciliation between radically different perspectives, knowing there is no satisfactory way of doing so. Yet, Seamus Heaney has observed, "As long as the coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counterweighting function. It becomes another truth to which we have recourse, before which we can know ourselves in a more fully empowered way." "The hypnotic effect of Waters' work is the grace with which she moves from ordinary time into realms of eternity, from details of everyday life in specific geographic settings into the colored shadows of memory." ?Susan Cahill, Phd., author of Hidden Gardens of Paris, The Smiles of Rome and Women & Fiction "Waters' poetry exhibits arresting yet familiar imagery that is deeply inflected emotionally, together with an impressive technical sophistication." ?Susan Zimmerman, Professor Emerita of English, Queens College, CUNY. Editor of Shakespeare Studies "I like the tang of authenticity in Waters' work, the sense of lived-in, felt experience offered in a plainspoken, unaffected way," ?Eamon Grennan, Emeritus Professor of English, Vassar College. He is the author of Out of Sight, Still Life with Waterfall and Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century.