Exact Place, The

This impressive poetry collection by Mary Ann Waters is a testament to the virtues of maturity. It is, as its title might suggest, exact, 'exact' in the full etymological sense of that word: every slurred, inaccurate, arbitrary possibility has been driven out, leaving only the necessary. But what a generous helping of the necessary Waters has left us; for The Exact Place is, in all the best senses of the term, generous.It is generous in the sweeping and various terrain of its subjects. But the most pronounced aspect of its generousity appears to derive from a source less palpable than craft, to be made possible by the capaciousness ( in both her imaginative and her lived life) of the person behind the poems. This person, who knows something not only about poetic art but about the art of living, has risked herself fully in the world and come back to us now, wiser but nowise sadder. In Water' amplitude, in her capacity for both tough and tendermindedness, and in the indefatigable energy and exuberance of her poems, The Exact Place reminds us of the poetry of another fine northwestern poet, Carolyn Kizer.-- Jonathan Holden