I find my bearings by clouds of moon jellies / afloat beneath my anchored boat, / pulsing the sea’s bright night, / their milky way, unfurling.

In these lush and vivid poems water gloves a swimmer’s body, is “satin, yes, viscous. Albumen, vernix, newborn slick.” It “rinses gai lan – bright green in a silver bowl” in Hong Kong or hibernates in the Pacific Northwest “under a silky pelt / of rain. People-less. Days, months of this / hiss, softness breaking cliffs.”

Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool simmering through a family’s veins, water is the main character here. It can be turbid, the amniotic colour of spittle, or, in a time of drought, “brilliant beads.” As “a stream flushed over granite,” water seems to want “so little it shares another’s colour,” yet here, it gets our full and necessary attention.

Rich with vibrant language and intensity, these poems sizzle in lyric form, monologues, elegy, and haibun. Water Quality calls on us to consider that our very survival is at stake unless we make a vow to this vital element to cherish it as we would a partner.

Cynthia Woodman Kerkham was born in Toronto, raised in Hong Kong and Vancouver and has lived in France. She has a degree in Asian Studies and English literature from UBC and has worked as a potter, journalist and teacher. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including The Antigonish Review, Room, CV2, The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, Grain and Prairie Fire. In 2009 she won the Federation of BC Writers Literary Writes Competition. Good Holding Ground is her debut collection of poems.

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“The poems in Cynthia Woodman Kerkham’s Water Quality wash over the reader’s psyche like a blessedly cool drink poured down a parched throat. Alive with a keenly attentive inquiry, driven as much by generosity and wonder as by a muted rage, these poems, delicate and fierce by turns, rinse the grit from our eyes, allowing us to better see what water, in all its forms, is to us - and what, to our peril, we let run down the drain.” Anita Lahey, author of While Supplies Last and Fire Monster