The Water Carrier

By Steve Straight

Steve Straight's skillfully crafted poems cover a wide range of topics-love, marriage, family, work, and class issues. Not since E. A. Robinson has anyone captured the essence of the New England town with such keen observation. What gives this volume its distinctive voice is a Buddhist calm, tinged with irony and humor. Steve Straight touches the ordinary things of life with a magical whimsy and a delightful self-deprecating humor.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1880684837
• ISBN13: 9781880684832
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Curbstone Press
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Hallmarked with wit, observation, and humor

Steve Straight is a professor of English and director of the poetry program at Manchester Community College in Connecticut. The Water Carrier showcases his remarkable talents as a poet in his own right and will well serve to introduce an appreciative readership to a body of work that is hallmarked with wit, observation, and humor. What Teachers Dream: It is an old classroom, with a smoky transom/tilted above the door, high walls stained brown/and two-person wood tables bolted to the floor./Of course he has never taught physics before,/nor taken it, but he can't remember that,/can only feel the swollen sense of being unprepared.//What is so sweet, though, is the way the students/hunch forward expectantly in their seats,/mechanical pencils in their hands like furled umbrellas/on the shore of knowledge, poised to absorb the nonsense/scrawled on the board. by the way the chalk dust/feels on his fingers, and by the way the 2's are formed/in the equation moored to the diagram, he can tell,/too, that despite the depth of this confusion/he is prepared to try.