Another Way to Split Water

Another Way to Split Water
Alycia Pirmohamed

Water takes the shape of loss, memory, and longing as it flows through Alycia Pirmohamed’s lyrical and achingly beautiful debut collection Another Way to Split Water.

What does it mean to exist in a politicised body laden with history? To find belonging whilst existing in a body that ‘reaches for / another land’? Writes Pirmohamed: ‘I am a woman that carried / my first heartache / before I was born.’ Darkness and the self are grappled with throughout the collection, tenderly at points—‘I am a long night of rain / with my mother’s eyes’—and fraught in others—‘too dark, too dark, too dark’—with a tension that brims beneath the poems.

There is a sense that womanhood is something ‘spilling’, ‘spooling’, ‘pouring’ from one ancestor to another—that sorrows are inherited. Women are doubled as they split apart, like cells, and splitting is both an interrogation and a transformation. In this rigorously crafted collection, Pirmohamed uses precise, scientific language to capture shifting parts of the self and hold them up to the light—as though they can be ‘named into truth.’

Throughout, Pirmohamed navigates themes of journey and distance. The collection itself is made up of two halves. Part II opens with a deeply moving poem that meditates on the cruelty of a homeland where ‘welcome / edges further and further away / even as you walk right into your childhood eyes.’ The poems shift masterfully across place and time. This is a world where women hold ‘distances already within’ them and there is ‘departure in every window’.

The poems search for a lost country and a lost history which become muddied, ‘imagined,’ and reshaped into a ‘version of a version’ through the process of remembering, though the body itself holds these landscapes and histories within it. Pirmohamed’s bright and exact imagery sings: ‘I fold my body / like a fig / against a stippled moon.’ The border between the self and nature is constantly dissolving: ‘to love, even briefly, the elk of your own tongue.’

There is a leaping, dream-like, playfulness with metaphor—in one poem ‘evening kick[s] her feet’ and in another ‘the pine has learned how to swoon.’ These meaningfully layered and unexpected images hum with life. Something is just out of reach—ghosts fringe the forests of Pirmohamed’s verse and vanishing deer and elk slip allusively in and out of view. There is an aching to transcend and Pirmohamed deftly strips back longing to its root with the clear, repeated wish to ‘become a bird’ or ‘simply a sound travelling / vertical.’ Another Way to Split Water is shot through with love, beauty, and deeply tender moments that live on far beyond the page.

—Roshni Gallagher