The hallmark of The Water Books poems is their leaping associations, whereby each poem takes in a stunning range of experience. The opening poem, “The Black Dress,” for instance, moves from the pleasure of wearing a new dress, to an urban setting, to a meditation on death including the dress as shroud, to river and sea as carriers of life and death, to the latitude connecting Pittsburgh and Rome, to appreciation of the friends who gave the gift of dress, to the dress as metaphor for night sky with its moon and stars.

Since her first volume, Vollmer has shaped astonishing juxtapositions and memorable lines:

These continue in”My Sublimation,” from The Door Open to the Fire (1998):

and in the “Ice Fall,” from Reactor (2004):

Unlike the earlier volumes, The Water Books opens and closes with poems that mirror each other. In both, the speaker locates herself in a city at night (Pittsburgh and the ancient city of Selinunte in Sicily), water plays a richly literal and metaphoric role, and death is considered and displaced by remembered friendships (“The Black Dress” and “Night at Bosco”). Vollmer’s latest collection of poetry travels the way of water, both water and poems moving through tight places, filtering down through hardship, restoring and stored by all of Earth’s inhabitants. The work reveals an appreciation of love, friendship, wild places, family, ancestors and their physical locations. It also shifts the spotlight from appreciation to awareness about our environment and the larger questions of humanity: concealing human costs of war, hunting as a guaranteed animal kill, and vanishing wilderness. These poems hold in tension the “mini-vision” of what is and can be, versus what regrettably is.