"The river is largely implicit here," writes Linda Gregerson about her acre of woods. Whether open to view or underground, her river maps communal fate: everything that lives is its direct dependent. The river can also bring infection; it is a branching repository for toxicity. It carries news, much of which is a litany of harm -- recklessness, malice, failures of heart, and failures of attention -- but the poems in WATERBORNE somehow extract from adversity a syntax of devotion. "The past / that has a place for us will know us by / our scattered wake," Gregerson also writes. The resilient tercets in which these poems are written might themselves be thought of as a scattered wake - the luminous record of movement through various lives. These stirring poems can be considered tools for staging daily rescues from oblivion. Their occasions are diverse - a barn fire, a wounded deer, a child's determined struggle with a bicycle - but their instinct is always to wrest from the impure world a vernacular of praise. As Mark Strand has written, "Linda Gregerson's poetry is among the very best being written."