Honest Water

Robert Farnsworth has sought to write poems that “simultaneously think and sing.” His poems are meditative and musical with measured pace. The landscape of northern New England, “the Atlantic’s edge,” is central to the vision of this book. It becomes a living phenomenon with human qualities: “honest water”; “strong water”; a landscape that has “diminished and forgiven him.” He writes sometimes in melancholy about human affairs: “a common durable sadness,” “a language of loss, of everything unassuaged,” “a thousand discouragements,” “the underwater light/that comes before a storm.” And often of quiet memory, “imagination’s tender lens,” and of anticipation, “the love your empty dress is promising.” Honest Water is a book of steadily evolving power.