Ruth Thompson’s QUICKWATER ORACLES: Conversations and Meditations is a series of “channelings” – that is, it is presented as the voices of various spirit beings, from fairies to dragons to Arcturians, speaking through the poet-author, and giving her advice on how to experience life, how to understand her role in the universe, and how to open herself to a more profound existence. This is her experience and subsequently her revelations – that “the point is the experience itself”, the process, the joy, not necessarily the concrete or practical result – are rather unpolished. She is putting these words to paper as part of her experience, and is specifically urged by her guides not to treat this book as an achievement or a project to be done, or to place too much importance on other people’s opinion of it.
There are a range of influences here from multiple spiritual traditions, thrown together spontaneously without much coherent connection or background, including a Mother Goddess-figure, Buddhist urgings against attachment and ego, spiritualist concepts like deeper dimensions of existence beyond the veil of reality, the voices of animals such as crows, hawks, bears, and blue jays, and even rocks, tornadoes, and other beings usually considered “nonsentient,” etc. The poems are mostly in a stream-of-consciousness form which feels spontaneous and energetic, but there’s little polishing or concern for rhyme, meter, rhythm, or the music of traditional poetry. It feels like an attempt by the author to get the heart of her feelings and experiences on paper without bothering with fancy dress – a wildflower garden, overflowing with color and scent, making no distinction between “flowers” and “weeds”, not an elegant ikebana arrangement in a carefully-chosen vase.
The writing itself ranges from repetitive, lively, almost childlike energy – such as Hawk’s “And the shouting! shouting! to one another…and diving and scooping, scooping! It is good it is good it is good!” – to more intellectual, thoughtful discussion of trust, self-ness, purpose, and other important topics, changing tone from one poem or prose bit to the next, as the speaker changes. That way, the reader can almost feel the speaker’s presence, from the cheerful delight the cardinal feels in its own bright red color to the warmth of a mother explaining unconditional love to a child. At the same time, though, this is intensely personal stuff, aimed at Thompson alone for the most part, with third-party readers mainly a side consideration, so how much a reader gets out of this book will probably depend on how close their own spiritual perspective and needs are to hers.
Ruth Thompson’s QUICKWATER ORACLES are “channelings” that offer inspiration, food for thought, and some really lovely turns of phrase, but are not intended to be polished poetry and as such are meant more for the author’s own benefit than the reader’s.
~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader