Swinging Between Water And Stone
Published by Galleon Books
When the publisher and editor of Galleon Books, Lee Thompson, offered to reissue this full-length poetry collection after it had gone out of print, I knew that I wanted the Galleon version to be different from the original and decided it would instead be a revised edition. The majority of my edits were focused on rethinking line breaks rather than language, although there were some minor revisions or deletions in that regard.
Aside from the edits to the collections’ original poems, I also added four new poems. The collections’ general theme is reincarnation. It is divided into four sections that, respectively, are meant to loosely represent Birth, Life, Death and Rebirth. The poems in each section don’t necessarily stick to the topic in question, there is some thematic overlap. Nevertheless, the four new poems fit seamlessly into the overall scheme of things.
As a writer of both fiction and poetry, I try to be conscious of any organic crossover. I hope the economy of language and imagistic confrontations that are necessary to poetry will find their way into my prose and the narrative thrust in my fiction will somehow shape my poetry.
The way I now understand the difference between poetry and prose is probably an over-simplified version of something I read in Matthew Zapruder’s excellent book Why Poetry?
As I understand it, the primary purpose of prose is to convey an idea or message or story and secondly to use language to achieve this. So, language is there solely to support the idea or message or story. In poetry it is flipped around. The primary purpose of poetry is to explore language and secondly to convey an idea or message or story. So, the idea or message or story is there solely to support the exploration of language.
As a wise young writer/publicist once wrote to me: genre isn’t as relevant as you might think. The poems in this revised edition are not, strictly speaking, prose poems. But in the process of rethinking the line breaks – often favouring longer lines (sometimes followed by much shorter lines for dramatic contrast) and concentrated blocks of text – I am trying to use the ideals of prose and poetry, as laid out above, to mutually support each other. Or, put another way, I want the poems to celebrate their inner-prose selves. A two-style solution that seeks to recognize the sometimes uneasy, but always mercurial alliance between language and narrative.
Praise for Swinging Between Water and Stone
“Overall, though, this is a strong collection, and Galleon deserves praise for issuing this second edition of an out-of-print collection. As a writer, Mayoff never pulls his punches, and there are many memorable poems about the various adventures, stresses, and ironies of being alive in these times.”John Oughton - The Seaboard Review
"SWINGING BETWEEN WATER AND STONE, is as comforting as a sauna on a hot humid day (If you love saunas, you’ll know what I mean). All of Mayoff’s emotionally honest and muddy truths bring the reader closer to our own thoughts about life, death, and all the miraculous possibilities (the ones that hide in the back of your mind behind a big fat question mark), the ones we shove back there because they are the nothingness of our existence; the unhappiness and joy of loneliness; they are the people we’ve loved and lost and the experiences that went with them; they are the fear of death and what comes after (who knows?); they are the reflections of all that fear, but they are also the music of life, and all the love we want, and they are the beauty inside language.”
Alison Gadsby – author of Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive and host of the Junction Reads reading series.
“The poetry here is nature-forward and varies from abstract to colloquial. That the author is a master word-smith, is made clear from his fiction, but made doubly so by this lively compilation.”
Jake Swan – author of Grantrepreneurs and Oliver Bell and the Infinite Multiverse
“I was especially impressed by the joyous irreverence of Half a Poem, the delicate linguistic turns in Safe Words, and how Glasgow (Revisited) reshapes the very way you read.”
K. R. Wilson – author of Call Me Stan: A Tragedy in Three Millennia, long-listed for the Leacock Medal for Humour
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