Another Way to Split Water

In Alycia Pirmohamed’s first full-length collection, Another Way to Split Water, figures split, double, and even shatter through inheritances of migration: “Even as a young girl, you found fragments / of the broken mirror that same country handed you.” A second-generation Canadian now based in Scotland, Pirmohamed explores her familial roots in Tanzania and India in poems full of longing for a “lost country,” “lost language,” and “lost sisters,” and through figures such as Nerium Oleander, who has “lost / her origin,” and Persephone, who laments, “I will never be whole.” 

Yet through bodily acts of prayer and observation of the natural world, Pirmohamed simultaneously builds meditative poems of presence. The speaker pleads, “Pull a string of sorrows from / my mouth,” and invokes prayer as a lineage, both familial and spiritual:

I walked into the beads of thirty-three alhamdulillahs, 
I walk into my childhood mouth, repeat alhamdulillah. 

Four decades ago, father too walked into this prayer,
his body nested in the oblong Boeing, his alhamdulillah

humming deep until it matched the scale of the engine.

In one of the many instances of transformation in the collection, Pirmohamed merges bird flight and song with the act of prayer: “I praise once again, I symmetry / like the wings of a migrating bird, I repeat alhamdulillah // and rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat, like the rokrok of an egret.” This collection’s most compelling lyricism rests in such moments, as with the poem “Hinge,” which joins the physicality of the natural world, in this case a mountain in the poet’s former home of Alberta, with a visionary devotion: “And, yes, I prayed today, but […]” the speaker says, ending the poem a few lines later:

The only time these hands have ever flowered,

have ever been used for something good,
was that spring at Yamnuska, where we found a clear

blue door of glacial water, and I walked right through
your reflection.