Arts & Entertainment

Regent Square Writer Releases New Book of Poems

The Water Books was released in January, written by Judith Vollmer.

Judith Vollmer's latest book of poems is rich in the theme that surrounds her childhood and life—water.

The Water Books was released by Autumn House Press in January. The Regent Square poet, who doubles as a full-time professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg campus, worked on the book for the last six years.

The idea came to her in the late ‘90s when she became very conscious of the fact that she wanted to write about water.

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“I write from place, and since we are in a place rich with this natural resource, it made sense to me,” Vollmer said. “I was also aware of wanting to address environmental motifs with a closer lens.”

But as that specific idea came to her, she wrote another book of poems in the meantime called Reactor. That particular collection was about environmental devastation and destruction, as she has family who worked in the fuel and nuclear sector.

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“After 9/11, I was lucky enough to go with the National Geographic team to Yucca Mountain,” she said. “I had that experience and wrote Reactor. It had many cycles about many things. The Water Books came after that.”

Vollmer described The Water Books as a very different publication filled with poems about family, politics and Pittsburgh, along with lyrical poems about landscapes, and treasure—being water.

“I grew up in Westmoreland County and eastern Westmoreland where we camped and played is a very precious natural area,” Vollmer said. “The rock mass and the Laurel Mountains filters water and we had some of the purest water right out there.”

While Vollmer travels to that area daily for work and returns home to Regent Square, the site of Nine Mile Run, Vollmer said it simply made sense—writing about what she sees each day.

“I am trying to sharpen my lenses and the new work I am looking at now is all about that—optics and literal vision,” Vollmer said. “Working through image and ways of using image as a force inside of a poem. Some poets write from sounds and idea and meditation, on say an emotionality, where others write strictly from place and I am working through visual field.”

Vollmer grew up hiking the creekbeds of the Laurel range. Some poems are inspired by those specific experiences. Another inspiration for the poetry includes seeing some of those places being ruined by mines.

“My younger brother used to hike through Sulfur Creek, which has now been restored and its real name is Brush Creek,” Vollmer said. “Some of the place references are very specific.”

Another poem has a sci-fi inspiration after a childhood experience in which she saw one of the first refrigerator-sized computers in the 1950s at a friend of the family’s house.

“As an 8-year-old, I didn’t know what it was except to understand it as a weather machine,” Vollmer said. “My parents had wild imaginations and would tell stories about natural phenomena and the story I apprehended from them was that this machine could do magical things.”

"The Water Carriers" poem is inspired by this machine that could detect water sources in outer space that we could draw on, Vollmer said.

“I was spinning on this idea of a child’s tale of this machine,” she said.

Vollmer has an upcoming reading from The Water Books this March 30 at Carlow University, hosted by another Regent Square poet, Jan Beatty. For more information or to buy the book, click here.


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