Voices Over Water

About the Book

These early poems, collected by the author, represent his initial efforts to create a poetic vocabulary. They contain exercises, explorations and études; ideas, both fertile and still-born; experiments in meter and rhyme. Although the author described the included poems as merely “ripples in the grammar”, close reading of the simplest poem “Stage Fright” and the more complex “Quadriphobia” reveal his struggle to find a balance between life and death, man and God, and meaning and nothingness. They provide readers a fascinating view into C. B. Reeves’ creative furnaces, where the language, mythology, and vision of his later work were forged.

About the Author

Christopher Bromley Reeves was born on Oxford, England in 1946 where his American father was a student after WWII. His mother was English, having been an elementary school teacher during the War. He was christened in Keble College chapel where on of his godfathers was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Recepient of an academic-athletic scholarship to Cornell University, he nonetheless completed his BA degree in English at the University of California, Berkeley. Until his bout with cancer in 2003 he was an executive with oil and construction firms. The drawing on the cover was done in his twenties.