Wading through the Waters

B. D. Navarre Reviews of A Child of Many Waters by Erin Lierl Published by Lavender Ink

Expansive and vibrantly metaphysical, A Child of Many Waters offers beautifully-woven metaphors as we follow Erin Lierl on concurrent physical and philosophical voyages across the world and the spiritual undercurrents bubbling beneath its surface. Lierl begins her journey not at “the end of things, [nor] the beginning of things” but some transitory place within and without the cycles of time. Whether it be New Orleans “taking off her gloves”, Puerto Rico “wrapped up in herself” or London “bare…without eyelashes”, each place becomes host to and evocation of the internal odyssey upon which Lierl embarks to understand the nature of existence—its pleasure, its pain, and its “confusion and grief” that spawn “depression-waves around the roof of the brain.” Throughout the book, these musings on pain and other realities of existence are stitched together by a shared theme of fluidity and bodies of water as suggested by the collection’s title.

While many of these musings occur beneath the umbrella of “I”, A Child amounts to much more than a collection of subjective wonderings and wanderings. Longer moments of prose poetry are interspersed with bits of wisdom from friends, family, and strangers she overhears on the street, thus giving the poems an air of artistic collaboration. Liberated, the narrative allows itself to flow into brief points of oneness, where at multiple reprises, its speaker, un-becomes. Here, Lierl dives into the role of pure observer as she transforms herself into a medium through which external stimuli passes—the affairs of nature and the locals of whatever “waters” she finds herself in as in the following:

A man rubbed his crotch and stared at me. A lady with a pet rat told me her woes, her voice barely audible over the crowd. She wets herself. She is in the fourth stage of cancer. Her sons impregnate women without knowing their hearts—she beats her own breast: thunk, thunk. Everyone pointed their phones at one other. The musicians filmed the lady with the rat. She was drinking a long can of beer. Dirty young people on the curb smoked Pall Malls.

Even as it slips in and away from the subjective, the collection maintains a strong sense of vitality as the narrator’s surroundings—both people and places—take on beautiful lives of their own. “Even time is alive,” declares Lierl. “Moments pass, holding up their skirts from the wet pavement.” Saturday arrives “with its shoes off.” These images breathe life into every facet of each moment, personifying them at times more than the characters quoted within the poetry.

Re-becoming, as human existence demands of us, breaking the surface to shout “I am afraid” and “I am not nothing!”, thus capturing the inevitability of selfhood. What might have amounted to arid philosophical musings or monotonous cycles becoming and unbecoming of the ego for a less talented poet, Lierl sidesteps predictability with ease through a diversity of form and liveliness of language. Where the narrator’s transcendent meditations break off with each section, a few lines a meter trails after and, like a Greek chorus, echoing in energetic end-rhyme the lessons learned in the preceding one. Take the poem that closes the work’s sixth section, a light piece dripping with a simpler vulnerability than that of the complex metaphors:

Now my heart’s so clean

you can see right through

and the inmates freed

and the caged birds too

and the ladies shine

like marionettes

Across fourteen sections, we observe a complete philosophical transformation—away from the very human desire to escape suffering to the recognition of pain’s essentiality and even utility. The passive that pain we carry day by day, filling and emptying us out becomes food for growth. side-effect of life. Within the final thirty pages of A Child of Many Waters, Lierl concludes that she “travel[s] on this melancholy. This pain is [her] road. The sadness, the hollowness, is engine, is fire, is fuel.” This development—or rather culmination—stands in stark contrast to an earlier characterization of pain as “crawling over the streets, looking for fuel.” Such a shift illustrates the philosophical metamorphosis that occurs over nearly three-hundred pages and thousands of miles.

Aside from her mastery over poetic and figurative forms, Lierl articulates an uplifting message of optimism. Even as hopelessness bred by perpetual pandemics and puerile, orange-toned politicians threaten to submerge society, Lierl closes the collection by encouraging her readers to consider “the way [we] all fit together” and for each day that we “wake to worship the world”, we should be grateful.

B. D. Navarre is a nonfiction writer and would-be poet from Louisiana. She hopes to soon scrawl enough verses in her Notes app to put together a proper poetry collection.