Diving Makes the Water Deep

Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP is a memoir about cancer, teaching, and poetic friendship. Alternately wise and wild, humorous and moving, Savich writes of illness and illness narratives, the present moment, pain, memory, desire, and poetry's oft-debated capacity to matter: Justify why you have an eye. How come nursery rhymes, how come tulips and clouds, fear and bread, insight without immediate application. In the tradition of previous poet-teacher treatises--Mary Ruefle's MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY, Richard Hugo's Triggering Town--this book's inquiry embraces the reader as correspondent, collaborator, and confidant. DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP, Savich's second book of nonfiction, is a huge-hearted, riotous memoir--one that will inspire those who love poetry and those who hate it toward further escalation, care, and entanglement. I have heard it said that a spiritual practice is just that, practice, for use when your crisis comes. You can call upon it then, and it ought to be answerable to that call. Laid bare here and put to the test is one writer's extraordinarily developed practice of reading, as well as his related exercise of full, ardent friendship and of disinhibited personal freedom; and DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP is a powerful account of why they matter when they matter. This bodied, tender, generous, furious book-long essay discloses the imperiled life, self-led learning, and consequential living, that have made Zach Savich better than any poet of our generation at weighing the momentary and offering the present.--Brian Blanchfield This book is radically alive. Visionary, cantankerous, lustful, generously attentive to what Agee called 'the common objects of our disregard.' Savich writes, 'My favorite concept remains the actual, despite everything.' Why settle for a life circumscribed by recieved notions of right and wrong, when you could instead live in the world, 'entangle further'? In the tradition of the great poet-teacher treatises before it... DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP gifts the reader closer contact with the world by documenting one life's devotion to art.--Lisa Wells If everything you've ever heard said about poetry was a beautiful forest in which everyone had already dutifully documented every fir and fern, muskrat and butterfly, but no one had ever turned over a single stone on the forest floor and observed what was living on the surface of the soil out of casual notice, then reading this book is like--I know it sounds crazy--getting to breathe the earth beneath that stone.--Mark Leidner