I read The Water Cycle in the airport, while waiting for my flight, and while reading my notes I’m thinking it shows. The chapbook was particularly fitting for that moment, given the author’s talks of flights and that underlying feeling of wanting to flee.
I am in love with how she could make so many imageries connected to water feel new every time. As a lover of water myself, it made me see it in a new light, a more dangerous one I would not usually think about. Water gives life, but it can take it just as easily.
Water also permeates the whole collection in how it’s written, flowing easily from one poem to another but never feeling repetitive.
A feeling of nostalgia, of melancholy, seeps through the words, especially in poems like Hydrology III, which talks about the author missing her father, sometimes forgetting he’s gone, almost hoping that this forgetfulness will get him to reappear.
But “A paint brush/ a ghost will not keep the floods away”, Gordon concludes.
This collection feels like the best kind of travel, like being home and everywhere else at the same time. And anyone who loves travelling knows this feeling, the one you get in a strange city, where you don’t know or understand anything, and yet you’re in the right place.