As Water Moves

"In his stunning new collection, Roger Mitchell discovers 'that the hill we stood on / looking off in the distance / for the thing was the thing itself.' Like William Carlos Williams, Mitchell searches for an ever-flowering present in the things of this world and practices deep attention to people, place, and memory. AS WATER MOVES brilliantly charts the fluidity of attention, moving between natural observation, familial recollections, local relations, and compassionate perception. These poems present a riverous map of the psyche, tributaries of thought leading to a larger body of knowing where the observer and observed become one. As Mitchell says, 'The edges of things turn toward each other / as though there were no otherness or kind.' I have been reading Roger Mitchell's poetry for forty-five years and always find in it nourishing streams and wellsprings of human compassion. AS WATER MOVES is his latest gift of a poetics that seeks the fruits of a deep practice of generosity and love."--George Kalamaras