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Before heaven will suffice, I go listening for a word,
Its oily meat, its newborn orbit. Come with me, now.
—From "Inside Hell's Kitchen"
As the son of a sailor who grew up on Lake Erie, J.P. White is given to sudden violent storms and rough water that test and shape a man's grasp on the living. No matter how far his poems travel—Russia, Bermuda, Italy, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Mexico, France, New York City, Africa—water is never far from the elemental current that feeds them. As such, his poems are brightly lit with a searching out of islands, distant cities, and those thin places where the truth of our wounds and our wonder shine through.
The new poems in All Good Water speak convincingly about the death of friends and family, the renewal of marriage, lost shoes, abandoned children, and failed boats, as well as larger troubles in the torn fabric of America and our historic obsessions with expansion and blood purity.
In the last thirty-five years, J.P. White has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews, and poetry in over a hundred publications, including The Nation, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, The American Poetry Review, and Poetry. He is a graduate of New College in Sarasota, Florida; Colorado State University; and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of four books of poems and the novel Every Boat Turns South.
Part I
Inside Hell's Kitchen
Sunday Morning in Washington Square, 1968
Riding the River, Rolling the Bones
The Children's Barge
Lying in Bed Listening to the Train Pass through
Wayzata, Minnesota
At the Church of the Gladiators
White Silk
The Dancing Girls at the Diplomat
The Company We Keep
Open or Closed
40 Winks at the Cliff Castle Casino Hotel
in Camp Verde, Arizona
The Eye of Night
Hate & Envy
The Light Between the Mountains and the Sea
On the Mexican Train
My Lost Shoes
The Bumblebee
This Theory of Travel
Southern Comfort
The Dry-Docked Sloop
Part II
My August Susans
Push
My Mother's Girdle
Human Form
American Beach
Flying Over America
The Russian Smile
Lincoln's Hat
The Hospital of the Innocents
Adam's Extermination
Visiting the Wise Men of Cologne
Lights on for Safety
Shy Orange Slash
November
Thinking About the Enemy
Last Entry in the Logbook
Part III
Cleaning the Book Shelf
The Octopus
To Catch a Boat
The Origin of Farewell
On Any Given Day
Happiness is a Boat to Anywhere
Conversation for Another Day
My Crocodile
The Day You Can't Replace
The Minor Argonaut
Leaving Manzanita
When Things Go Wrong on Boats
The Found Marriage
The One Wind
Stage 4
The Green Sleep
Shard
Those Who Stay, Those Who Leave
All Good Water