Life Under Water

British writer Maura Dooley’s collection of poetry Life Under Water (2008) revolves around a central theme of water, but the individual pieces regard it as symbolic: flowing, like time; submerging memories and feelings; melancholic when it comes down in the form of rain and snow; and altogether powerful, with the force to kill and the gentleness to nourish, much like the nature of man. Life Under Water was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.

Dooley uses the watery metaphor to delve into matters of the human heart, politics and social issues, and the mysteries of life and death that have fascinated poets since time began. Her spare, lyrical language only brings into sharper focus the profound insights she shares in these poems. There is nothing showy or gratuitous in Dooley's style. Like the water that inspires her, her voice, immeasurably calm, houses a whole world of feeling and energy beneath the placid exterior. This allows Dooley unique access to her subjects, a way to investigate the emotions that fuel us without being flooded by them, a sobering voice that is at once able to see the mundane and travel along the edge of the place where it meets the mystical.

Take the poem "The Elevator," which Dooley begins with a snapshot of the unassuming oyster. It opens "wondrous, and through mud/ lets glitter that translucent/ promise," and she then compares it to the opening and closing of an elevator door—where she finds herself standing next to none other than singer-songwriter-poet Leonard Cohen. Part of her feels that this chance encounter was fated all along. "How did you know I'd be here?" she wants to ask. But they travel in "radiant silence," and when Cohen steps off first, he checks to see if this floor is also her stop. "Is this where you wanted to be?" he asks. It is an unanswerable question, of course, one weighted with far more than what it poses on the surface. A random exchange with a superstar in an elevator becomes a moment of transcendence for Dooley, an opportunity to ask existential questions of herself—and, by extension, us.



Yet in quiet, seemingly insignificant moments, Dooley finds just as much meaning. In "Remark," she remembers saying something that makes her lover laugh. "Sudden, rich and startling/ it turned my head/ and such a flood of happiness was there/ that here was something I could do./ Something I’d forgotten I could do." A brief comment reopens a whole world that Dooley realizes she lost access to, for whatever reason. The happiness it brings her and her lover is palpable, and she lets both the happiness and the witty comment serve as a beacon that might make them "see the world more kindly."

A few of the poems take on political topics. In "The 1984 Perspective," Dooley looks at the varying viewpoints on the Battle of Orgreave, a miner's strike that was one of the bloodiest clashes in the industrial history of Great Britain. She begins the poem from the vantage point of the miners, looking at the "coal, washed up on the beach,/ handsome and useful…scavenged/ for a little warmth." Something so innocuous on the surface becomes the lynchpin for violent confrontation and unrest, as well as for unspeakable pain. But the waters of time burnish away this defining moment so it fits neatly into history books, with the depth of the pain it caused rendered unknowable, at least in its totality. What we hear today when we hear about the Battle of Orgreave is not "the whole story but the seam of something/ precious gone underground." This speaks to the gulf that separates one human being from the next, the stories and the pain we carry on our own, experiences that others can have an idea of but will never fully understand.

The centerpiece of Life Under Water is the lengthy poem "The Source." It is the poet's ode to water, a song of the beauty and the majesty of the fluid that sustains us. Dooley sings of the universal need for water, the primary role it plays in our lives, in our bodies, and in our planet. But she also addresses the abuse of water, the lack of it where it is sorely needed, and the tears it symbolizes. And, of course, "it is the breaking of the waters that begins it all"—this life, this pain, this possibility.



Like water, the poems of this volume are both delicate and tough, soft enough to cleanse and potent enough to move mountains, offering new perspectives and insights on the human experience. In the end, Dooley's verses carry readers along on a river of thought and feeling, celebrating the everyday, recognizing pivotal social issues and movements, and brushing up against the magical.