The Scent of Water

The Scent of Water has the memorable imagery, engaging perceptions, and heightened language we have a right to expect in genuine poetry. But it offers something else, something frequently missing in contemporary American poetry, even though that something is what most readers still desire: a personal voice speaking meaningfully about real life. Barone has been writing notable poems for thirty-five years, long enough to slalom over the waves of both confessional and language school poetry. Like the "one true horse" in one of her poems, by forgetting the race she has found her own inimitable dance, and it is not to be missed. -Kay Cavanaugh Barnes, author of Mortal Means There are poems in this book I adore, the others I simply love. Imagine a woman on a path stopping to examine something she's found, and you discover in her description a new world. Barone makes this happen by using exact language and music in precisely right images and quirky insights: "Nature is a maniac for sperm." "I hate the tyranny of windows." Her world is family, home, garden and the river; like Brueghel in his art, she's made scenes of their appearance on earth into a record of time. -Sharon Chmielarz, author of Calling In The Scent of Water Patricia Barone has united poems of the personal with poems that engage the larger world and its chaos. "We're sinking through the river silt to bedrock," the poet writes as she leads us deeply into nature and our own natures. With authentic insight, she describes what is at the border between the visual and the visionary, the ordinary and the ineffable, and gaining and losing. Her language pulses with the exhilaration of being alive. This is a book of water, especially the Mississippi and the lives it nourishes. "Water has endured..." and mothers, fathers, children, dirt, seeds, leaves, geese, crickets-all endure in a shared and threatened world. These poems, impeccable in craft, are swift, quiet arrows that pierce the reader as they recreate a life. -Mary Kay Rummel, author of What's Left Is the Singing Patricia Barone has spent most of her life on the Mississippi River in Minnesota, where she lives with her husband, Stan. Although she was born in Gainesville, Texas, she grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and lived for six years in New Orleans, Louisiana, and one year in Zurich, Switzerland. Over the past three and a half decades, she has published widely in anthologies and periodicals: Most recently, a poem was published in Inspired by Tagore, a SAMPAD (South Asian arts) anthology published by the British Council of India. Her work has also appeared in Irish journals: Revival (Limerick Ireland), The Shop (County Cork, Ireland), and in An Sionnach, published under the auspices of the Irish Studies Department of Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. She has also published poetry in the Canadian journal, Germination. Her United States publications also include those in And Magazine, Blue Buildings, Commonweal, Handbook III, Milkweed Chronicle, The Prose Poem Project, Ptolemy, Sidewalks, Sing Heavenly Muse!, Turtle Quarterly, Umbrella-Tilt a Whirl, West End, Widener Review, and Women's Quarterly Review. She received a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in poetry, chosen by Marilyn Hacker; a Lake Superior Contemporary Writers Award for the short story; and a Minnesota State Arts Board Career Opportunity Grant for a workshop with the Irish poet Eavan Boland.