Fluent in Rivers Kindle Edition

Kathleen Brewin Lewis’ chapbook, “Fluent in Rivers”, feels and reads like a full collection of quiet, finely-tuned poems. She is a very gifted poet whose precise and wonderful language imparts a great sense of place that sets the reader firmly in the moment of each poem. These poems bring the everyday to the outside world and reflect on how nature (winged and sea life, the weather, forest animals, moths) can help make sense of our lives – individuals, quite literally, in the wilderness, within families, loving partnerships, and vivid memories of those who have gone before. She does all this without saccharin, never shying away from darkness (“Landscape with River Birch”, “Sapelo”, and “Graveyard” are particularly powerful and stunning) yet skillfully imbues beauty and hope on every page. In the poem “Eggshell” when she writes, “The morning is a chiffon scarf.” and “The night is a winter/coat with silver buttons” one can no longer look at the sky the same way again. And when reading the last lines of “Voracity”, “I will/renounce the trail,/go deeper into woods,/stand in thick rain to do it,” all I want to do is follow. This book was a joy to read, and I heartily suggest you do.

If "Fluent in Rivers," a striking first poetry collection by Kathleen Brewin Lewis, were a novel, nature would be the leading lady. In the opening poem, “Whereupon the Writer Thinks She Is the Center of the Universe,” Lewis describes writing at night while beetles and moths beat upon the glass. Nature here and throughout the collection is palpable, insistently present:The night is alive, she is thinking,it is pulsing with the beat of my heart.And all eyes—all of the tiny, glittering eyes—are on me.But nature takes on another dimension—both religious and mystical— in such poems as “On the Brink” and “This Lonely Cognizance.” In this last she writes:….a solitary man beside a campfire,face illumined by orange glow,viewed from a great distance,seeing himself being seen,watched over, watching, acknowledged surely…Her tone is intimate and her language straightforward. She can be playful as in “The Largesse of Morning,” where she writes:“The sun, a freshly peeled orange,begins its climb;then spreads out a picnicon bright cloth.And then she can take us by surprise with the lyricism of a phrase like this one from “Graveyard”: The half moon is a headstone lodged/in the infinite throat of the night.”As is true with much good writing, this collection assaults the reader with its fresh way of viewing, the world, its gorgeous language and an intriguing ‘leading lady.’

These are quietly powerful poems. Kathleen Lewis has a sure hand when it comes to music, metaphor and precise language. Her poetry is personal yet universal, with the link between nature and self as an underlying theme. She alights on spirituality in a beautifully subtle way. In "There are Days," for example, Lewis writes:This is a day you lace your fingersinto thick grass,rouse yourselfwith a sense of belonging,tread so lightly on sandy soilyou leave a tender imprint.

Fluent in Rivers is an exceptional book. It is skillfully written by a poet who has an intimate connection to language. It's unusual to be moved by every poem in a book but I was. In Graveyard "a gritty wind blows over the earth,/ raps and riddles your shoulders." In On the Brink, the author writes 'I am drawn to descend, walk down/ into the sheer silence....." This book is authentic, elegant and inspiring.

There is not a poem in this small collection that is not perfection. Lewis is a careful, sensory writer. This is a volume to pick up when you need a lift or want to move your mind away from where you are.