Swinging Between Water and Stone

“Some will say we are monkeying with the grieving process when we swing between water and stone. Some say love is only courageous when we can let go.”

This excerpt from the poem “Courgette’s From My Sister’s Garden” is from Swinging Between Water and Stone, a revised edition of PEI author Steven Mayoff’s 2019 poetry collection, which is now being reissued by Galleon Books. The majority of the revisions were focused on rethinking line breaks rather than language, and four new poems have been included. 

The collection is divided into four sections that loosely represent birth, life, death, and rebirth. Reincarnation, seen as lacking empirical evidence, is often taken on faith. And yet, something as commonplace as the cycles of the seasons can provide clues to the mysteries that may lie beyond mortality, offering a way to make sense of the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. These poems are meant to celebrate the wheels within wheels that are constantly in motion throughout the natural world and in imagined landscapes.

The poems in this revised edition are not, strictly speaking prose poems, but Mayoff is trying to use the ideals of prose and poetry to mutually support each other. Or, put another way, he wants the poems to celebrate their inner-prose selves. A two-style solution that seeks to recognize the sometimes uneasy, but always mercurial alliance between language and narrative.