Swimming captures the winding energy of moving purposefully through water. It is Barbara Colin’s extraordinary take on the shadow world of memory, dream, creativity. Cutting through water, you are able to latch on to what you understand. When you trust the water that supports you, you solve, “dissolve” the questions of how you came to be. In this painterly world of Monet, Matisse, Ellsworth Kelly, being and doing become one. Colin is a voyager, an explorer of the unknown region of the soul with the body alone as vehicle. She traces her own history with the purposeful motion of the “recomposing sea,” the amniotic waters of being born and giving birth, of progressing through life. Her words attach, echo, separate, like the strokes that further one’s progress through the unfamiliar element. No one else I know writes like this, churning raw emotion up from the depths of thought to the surface with such acuity. Here, swimming laps is a kind of unreeling of the mind, literally, the stream of consciousness. And Colin doesn’t let us forget that the sand beneath the sea is also the sand of the hourglass, turning and finalizing.
–Elaine Terranova, Winner of the Walt Whitman Award and author of Perdido
Swimming: this poem cycle is an epic of intense mindfulness, a sustained act of spiritual athleticism. Afloat as we are in a sea of constantly shifting perspective, memory and perception, Swimming—and swimming—are the necessary, natural story —what it feels like to be alive. Even as “body breaks/into its strokes,” the underlying nature of our experience is revealed to be change, motion, evanescence, which create us and which we create. Like her close artistic cousins—Debussy, say, or Monet or Ashbery—Barbara Colin is an artist of ripple and wave-lap, “…undulations seen/through…light waves.” Her swimmer/self is buoyed by movement through time and space, in her own life, in ours, from birth to death, in the arc of earthly life, in the surrounding cosmos. The poet speaks as both womb and child of womb-world, of darkness and light, water and dust, height and depth, nature and culture. “Immersion for emergence sea.” Read this poem again and again. It will tell you who you are.
–Patricia Eakins, author The Hungry Girls and Other Stories, The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste
Baba, you must complete this. And so I did, finally, The Genealogy of a Sport, of which Swimming is one fluid section.
Baba, it’s unbelievable, this is really, really good, it’s so complex, but simple and personal, and pure…you should be proud of this, it’s so much you, I can tell you wrote it, good and bad in life comes back to use, keeps flowing through, it’s amazing baba. I had an idea for the cover. I wrote this down as I was reading it, visually.
Happiness…sadness…water…water runs through all these moments…existential…takes a step back while you are looking at small moments…underwater coming up…light gets bright…more abstract…explore that moment…all colors swirl around, you’re in water…safe space…just below surface. And you are about to breathe.
–Simon Usdan, Filmmaker Getting Through
Rebecca –
You will not put this book down, except to swim. It is a deep immersion in
art and poetry, mindfulness and memory. Brilliant.