It is hardly hyperbolic to say that every turn in Nienow’s debut collection is also revelation. It is a book of exact measure and precision, moving the reader through the interwoven apprenticeships of shipwright, marriage, and fatherhood. Yet for all the precision, all the devotion to plane and ruler, to rhythm and meter, there is a wonderful wildness and ecstasy as the poet, with lathe and line, tries to find those momentary stays against life’s sadness, pain, and confusion. The beginning of the book takes us through the poet’s first littoral splashes into the craft of shipbuilding echoing, we might assume, his apprenticeship as a poet. The book begins with a call to adventure, a Whitmanish invocation titled the “The Shipwright’s Prayer” in which Homeric muses are switched out with smaller, more vital gods of physical purpose and use:

O hammering body
made of teeth and saws

made of mallets turned
on the lathe

o awl, o holy geometry
of the try square and perfectly

sharpened pencil, o jar of rust
catacomb for the nail

And while Whitman’s ghost may haunt small corners, the precision of the orison is not some wild yawp in the wilderness. With lines and language of exact measure, with a shipwright’s syntax of both grace and function, Nienow deftly demonstrates the artisan’s understanding that to be off by an inch is to be off by miles. Moving through the book we see the narrator’s maturation as poet and builder as he begins to understand that the more he learns, the less he knows, and that the power to build implies the power to destroy:

It didn’t take long before the son realized the hammer was as good for wrecking as it was in keeping things together.

In the beginning, I imagine myself merely a rock, fit well to the palm, with a hunger for driving stakes and breaking weaker rock. Until I was the weaker rock.

House of Water is a book of tender strength that flies beautifully in the puffing face of toxic masculinity that pervades the world today. Here are hands that can craft, can find shape, can mend and make whole, all brought to us by a mind and tongue that knows the language of the adze and the plane.

How thin must a workable edge be? One must be unable to see even the slightest glare at the blade’s very tip.

I have made so many mistakes.

A subtle but sure narrative arc weaves through House of Water as the reader experiences the reality of every day’s task and the despair over imperfection that can swallow the narrator. By the second and third sections of the book this is true not only as builder and craftsman, but now also as husband and father. The narrator revels in family, in these creations that are greater both than poem and boat. But a deeper wisdom threatens to drown – to find love is to risk its loss and to bring life into the world means as well to invite the inevitably of death:

God

damn every struck thing
and the impulse to make.

God damn the scars
And the memories they bear,
The fist I carry with me

Everywhere; God damn
all that my hands fail
to hold and all they hold

too hard.

At the surface, House of Water is robust with traditional American definitions of masculinity. Carpenter, breadwinner, heterosexual husband and father are all characteristics that swim in the meniscus of the narrator’s sense of self. But deeper toward the seabed softy breathes the question of what it really means to be a man and whether the old definitions of masculinity can hold:

My handshake
will not tell you
what kind of man I am

The poems dive deep into the ideas of what a man is and supposed to be as the reality of the artist-artisan trying to shape his dreams from the material world while being faced with the hard reality of that world. This is harrowingly seen in the poem “In The Year with No Work” where, in the piscatorial search for meaning, the narrator must literally fish to feed his hungry family:

I would drive the pre dawn dark to stake
my spot to fish for dinner…

…where I had become a man
with no money,’
suddenly governed only with money, for there were mouths
and I had helped make them—

Yet the despair is not consuming, it does not drown the poet or the reader as much as the narrator begins to realize hammer and chisel will not win out over a sea of troubles. Rather, there is something hopeful and possible in succumbing to tidal currents, as in the poem “And”:

But more so for water, for it is all

and. Perhaps that is why we bathe in it. To feel carried off on the backs of ghosts

and gods. To feel how gently it lifts

and drowns, while something in us wakes

Throughout the book, meaning is made in the making of meaning, in narrator shaping the physical world:

I take the saw as seriously as god

and as well as being that which is shaped:

a reminder to live as closely

to the truth as one is able, even
through the truth is what will take your fingers

and later:

I give it an edge
and it stays. It gives me an edge.

The poet gives himself over to the task of living and making; he surrenders to the act of creation and perhaps finds meaning in the act or surrenders the impulse to seek such meaning:

I turn

the idea of the tool over in my hands.
That it works makes me want to work.
The work, it carves that want away.

The title for the book, House of Water, itself suggests a different kind of masculine strength. To build a house of water is not to build a wall. It is to build something permeable and permeating, something that suggests you are as only strong as your willingness to accept fragility. Here, surrender, be it to love or creation, is victory, is empowerment. Here we find the self in letting go of the self, in not merely swimming the sea, but becoming the sea, in not just building the house of water, but to be the water:

If when in the house of water, you do not
somehow feel both kept and free
you are no kin to me

This is a book of powerful resolve against the anger and bluster of the current global climate. One may question if in a time of pitched politics and social injustice if poetry of place, of tender loving and deliberate living, is necessary or enough. Such is a foolish question. There are so many beautiful and necessary works of poetry that do that work, that raise fists for the good fight, that come canines bared against the politics of hate. And that is exactly why House of Water is such an important book. The fight is important but so is the reason to fight. Nienow, in the way he slows us down to see the curve of wood, the light of the sea, the moment of childhood awakening, reminds us all of the painful beauty and beautiful pain of living in this world. He reminds us that this is a world worth fighting for after all. And as Israeli poet Yehudi Amichai said, “All poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”

House of Water is an affront to those who toil in vitriol, who wield the language of fascism and frightened patriarchy. This is no book of small charms and casual observations. In “Opening the Shop,” an early poem, Nienow writes that “more than a day’s work is at stake” and he could not be more right. All we hold dear is at stake, all that keeps us from shaking apart into madness and dissolution. The Sisyphean task of living is set ever before us all. There is certainly an absurdity in believing anything lies beyond the abyss, but, perhaps, it is how we approach that task that makes all the difference. As Camus wrote, “the struggle itself to reach the heights is enough to fill men’s hearts.” Nienow, as husband and father, poet and builder, experiences this and with the lyrical grace and tactile honesty of his poems, pours his house of water into the reader and fills the heart.