The Kindness of Water
by
Helen Jarvis
Publication date
ISBN:
March
2025
978-1-923248-08-3
About the author
HELEN JARVIS is a British-born writer who has lived for two decades in Melbourne/Naarm, where she teaches in a high school. The Kindness of Water is her first collection of poetry. Helen studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT. Her writing has won the Nillumbik Poetry Ekphrasis award and the Ada Cambridge awards for poetry and biographical prose. She was runner-up in the 2024 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize and has been shortlisted for poetry prizes including the ACU, MPU and Martha Richardson awards. Her poetry has appeared in award anthologies and in the Australian journals Island and Rabbit. She has featured on 3CR’s Spoken Word radio program, and in 2024 performed her poetry at the Third International Poetry Festival of Naoussa in Greece.
About the book
THE KINDNESS OF WATER is a braided river of poetry fed by many tributaries. Tender, intimate reflections on the loss of parents--through sudden tragedy or slow decline--mix with new readings of themes from classical mythology and the re-imagining of folk tales. There are cormorants, goldfinches, wild dogs in Africa and ghost moths; glimpsed whales and lost wedding rings; tales of Guy Fawkes and Harry Houdini.
A certain sense of longing and disorientation runs through the book: the perennial migrant experience, suspended between embracing a new world and regretting a world that has been lost. The perspective that emerges from this precarious balance lends a freshness and an urgency to the close observation that characterises these poems.
This is the work of a poet who has mastered her craft; Helen combines emotional maturity and a sophisticated intelligence with formidable command of technique to extract the universal from the particular, and insights into the enduring contradictions of the human condition from fleeting moments. The result is a book that demands to be read and re-read."
These tender, allusive poems tread the edges of myth and fact, memory and loss, the places where light and life begin and end. Dextrous and inventive, their balance of risk and craft is exhilarating.
——FELICITY PLUNKETT
Helen Jarvis writes poems that act as “the weight of a loving hand on flesh”. With acute attention towards photographs, bees, shirts, landscape, ashes, and words themselves, she breathes new life into collective and personal mythology. The Kindness of Water is a book of change, memory and desire, honouring the shifting ground beneath our feet with a precise and memorable music. Like water, these are fluid, clear and refreshing poems, with a remarkable tidal pull.
——ANDY JACKSON
Delicate, poised and precise, thoughtful and sincere, intimate yet wide-ranging, The Kindness of Water is a mature and accomplished first collection. Line by line, attentiveness to the rhythms and nuances of language convinces me this is real poetry, real feeling. These poems will resonate more deeply each time you read them.
——BROOK EMERY
A collection resonant with poignant silences, a space of wise contemplation. The Kindness of Water is sharply observant and deeply felt. Through these poems Helen Jarvis invited me into companionable witness of a life richly lived; they made me feel less alone.
——ES FOONG