Watermark in the Heart

Who knows just how it begins, the catastrophe that overwhelms and upends life, be it a human act or one of nature? Was it a whisper? A shrug? A puff of cloud on the horizon? A slight tremor beneath one's soles? Then what - when the whisper turns into a roar, when the tremor exposes a fault?

"Watermark in the Heart," a slim volume of poetry marking Barbara Butler McCoy's debut, offers hurricane season as a metaphor for the process by which human consciousness explores life and comes to an understanding of itself in the wake of those moments and events that shake and shatter the soul, and alter the personal, natural and universal landscape.