WATER BEARER
A Pouring of Poems
by Susan Schaefer Bernardo
Bernardo presents a collection of bittersweet reflections on change, motherhood, and loss.
If one central theme can be gleaned from Bernardo’s poetry in this collection, it’s the idea of transformation. The opening poem, “Breakage,” meditates on a bird’s nest as a metaphor for personal loss: “She wonders still / how to unfall the nest, / unshatter the egg.” “She Is Not” features a woman who vows to use her pain productively. “She Is Stillness” celebrates surrender, while “Hands on Heart and Belly” embraces embodiment. “Seasoned” explores a woman’s identity in strong animal metaphors through spring (fox), summer (honeybee), fall (fawn), and winter (bear). The poet’s family of origin and her created family are central to many poems as well. For example, she explores her tumultuous childhood and her parents’ marital strife in “Air Plant.” Providing care for a mother with dementia consumes the poet in “A Plague Upon Us” and “This Is a House of Dying.” The juxtaposition of love and helplessness is evident in poems about motherhood, such as “Near Drowning,” where the speaker seemingly seethes at her husband after their toddler narrowly cheats death: “I hate you for taking life for granted, like / a free balloon from the grocery store.” In “Water and the Witch,” the poet and her 7-year-old son angrily explode “like potatoes in the microwave” after she tries to toss him into the pool—and ends up in the water with him. She even takes readers back to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which she recounts her teenage son’s personal struggles in “Barnacles and Blessings.”
Bernardo gives readers an intimate glance into her life over many years in this collection. Poems such as “Tombstone” capture difficult decisions anchored in love, like sending her son to a ranch for boys with addiction issues: “We were dealing with a terrorist / who’d taken our child hostage. So we / sent him away.” The excitement of new love is palpable in “First Kiss,” which recounts “driving home my heart is open like my windows.” Erotic undertones are effective in poems like “Rock and Water,” which describes how “he catches me, strong and hard, spins me high / with a swirl of foam.” Imagery is almost always vivid and unforgettable, like a mattress “dipped on both sides like two / serving spoons laid out on either side of a carving knife.” While the book’s tone is serious, the poet does inject some humor in “The Care and Feeding of a Poet,” a faux instruction manual for creatives: “Some poets are easily bored and require / constant stimulation or they become self-destructive.” Ultimately, the collection succeeds as a testimony of crisis turned chrysalis: “I have evolved / into a creature who can fly / even after her heart is pierced.” However, some poems are too on the nose, like “You Can Grow Your Own Way,” which uses an unconventional garden as a metaphor for personal growth.These poems offer honest, tender, and sometimes painful observations that are as universal as they are personal.