Review: ‘Diving Makes The Water Deep’

Last week, I reviewed 'Watchfires” by Hilary Plum, an unconventional essay that considers - among much else - her husband's cancer. This week, I read Plum's husband's latest book, 'Diving Makes the Water Deep,” an unconventional memoir in which he considers - among much else - his own cancer.

Zach Savich is poet and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first book, 'Full Catastrophe Living,” won the 2008 Iowa Poetry Prize, the first of several awards his work has garnered. 'Diving Makes the Water Deep” is both a poetic book and a book much concerned with poetry, but it is also driven by the rigors of living with a cancer that has already claimed the lives of many members of Savich's family.

Savich makes it clear early on that he is dissatisfied with the run-of-the-mill illness memoir, which might have an arc leading from suffering to a kind of redemption or epiphany. He eschews this model, employing a structure that upends any straightforward narrative. Each chapter, except the last, is numbered until Savich, writing sections of various lengths, reaches one hundred. The sections flow together and diverge. Savich often abandons traditional syntax but never sense, using language worthy of a poet in a prose setting.

Here, for example, he acknowledges a shift in tone:

'Can you read my tone altering already and in every word further, having in this text enumerated gripes and pettiness and pedagogies and so I am now moving toward. Toward what? At this distance in these dimensions every step any direction is toward. The universe still writes with one shadow and very gentle ink.”

'Diving Makes the Water Deep” is an affecting text, in part due to its unconventionality, but ultimately due to Savich's attempts to be truthful and clear eyed about his experience. Poetry can serve as a balm for suffering, the book suggests, though the suffering continues.