Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic Paperback – 28 May 2018

Anna M. Evans’ Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic is a wonderful poetic weaving of the public tragedy of the Titanic and the personal tragedy of a mother’s death. The book is deeply researched but details never bog down the poems as history is spun musically through sonnets, sestinas (“The Lord’s Prayer on Collapsible B” is a master class in the sestina) blank verse, blues, triolets, and other inherited forms.

As well, Evans is able to capture the diction, wit, and rhythms of speech of those involved, from the almost newsreel rhetoric of the opening poem (“She is unsinkable. No need to fear/ Look at her, waiting at South Hampton pier”) to the very human voices, from steerage to first class, to the poet’s own finding of a language to work through loss (“We are all orphans as soon as we are born./ Mother I miss you. A tiny tragedy.”).

The mythological and pop cultural weight of the Titanic story could have sunk a lesser poet but Evans keeps us afloat, at least just enough to draw breath, while managing to avoid the trappings of sentimentality or cliché. And she does not avoid 1997 James Cameron film that hangs so heavy in our collective sense of this story:

Rose shivering on the wooden door
Celine’s voice haunting the movie score,
Jack, teeth chattering in the cold,
my daughter kicking in my hold,
I cried an ocean.
(from “Watching James Cameron’s Titanic While Pregnant with my Second Child”)

The graceful use of inherited forms and metrical verse is appropriately contemporary to 1912 Europe. The ravages and chaos of the 20th century are still brewing and the 19th century’s faith in order is yet lingering. But the great skill and artistry with which Evans crafts these poems makes them at once modern and hauntingly eternal, reminding us why such sonic echoes of rhyme, repetition, rhythm, and meter stay with us the way open verse often does not. They are as unbreakable and as fragile as the great ship that went down, and as the love we share for the people in our lives. And as we suffer today through a great mix of public and private tragedy such as school shootings and other terrorist attacks, the poems could not be more relevant:

When death arrives on such a monstrous scale
it feels unreal, which is, of course, made worse
by all the ways we retell the tale—
in stories, movies, songs, and even verse.
(from “A Meditation on Loss”)

As good as the whole book is, readers may not prepared for the brilliance, sadness, and humor of the final section of the book, a crown of sonnets that spins the story of Titanic through and around the death of the poet’s mother. You realize as you read it that the book has been building toward this the whole time, that it is an ending as inevitable as a ship bound for the iceberg and it works so well, scuttling the reader in the beauty of deathly cold waters. It is as lyrically stunning as it is emotionally harrowing and gives us permission to feel the immense suffering of a worldwide tragedy even in our own personal losses.