As its title suggests, Richard Gwyns collection displays a poetic psyche that is formed around water, but its concerns are more specific than that. Because, although various water-forms are considered, Gwyns overriding interest is the sea, which the collection variously evokes as, for example, a lost homeland (Footprints in the Sand), a place degraded by pollution (Oil Spill), and the provider of quasi-mystic visions (Drowned City).Recurrent throughout the collection is the image of a lover who is more at home in the sea than on the land, and who seems to represent a half-articulated desire to return to water. It is in this spirit that the evocative Footprints in the Sand proposes that we humans are long-term exiles from the sea, and in which the books intriguing opening poem offers up its longing for salt (a longing that Love Story neatly revisits). Thus, although Gwyns sea is potentially a place of both violence (Memory of Drowning) and pollution (Oil Spill), it is unsurprising that it is also distinctly mystical. For example, in Deep Down, the lover is apparently some sort of mermaid or sea-spirit with the power to override the normal human danger of drowning, whilst, in Strange Catch, symbols of personal significance mysteriously emerge from the water as part of a fishermans catch.However, Gwyns liquid poetics are apparent in his poems formal qualities as well as in their subject-matter. In the satisfying refusal of this collection to make everything resolutely clear, in its canny awareness of when to leave details in shadow in Dissolving, for example, who exactly is the dark figure stalking alleyways at night? the text asks us to view its narratives and images as if through the shifting medium of sea-water. In short, the texture of the poems performs their liquid concerns. Moreover, distributed amongst the poems, Lluís Peñarandas drawings are a fine complement to all this. Not only do they provide pictures of forms associated with the sea but, more significantly perhaps, they also provide pictures (such as those on pages 10 and 36) which suggest nothing less than a liquid flow between the forms of the sea and the forms of humanity.
