Left Bank #07: Head/Waters

In the past, Blue Heron's Left Bank series has assigned writers as disparate as Tess Gallagher and Ken Kesey to such themes as extinction and sex. Seventh of the Left Bank series, Head/Waters features established and emerging writers at work concerning the planet's most abundant, and possibly most threatened, natural resource. Each poem, short story and essay included offers a glimpse into this often personified force. The tickling, soothing waters of poet Gary Snyder's ``Flowing'' can hardly be the same deadly rapids Pam Houston's characters face in ``Selway,'' a short story as much about men and women as water. Baptism and drowning offer new beginnings and tidy ends to Lorian Hemingway and Jeffery Smith, whose personal essays veil a deeper sense of natural history and loss. In the 19th-century, reclamationist William E. Smythe attempted to capture and capitalize on water's ubiquitous allure, only to fall victim, as William deBuys points out in ``You Can Be in My Dream if I Can Be in Yours,'' to a blurred utopian vision of a verdant Southwest. Now more than 100 years later, California rice farming threatens to drain the Sacramento River. There are no smart environmental answers offered here, only individual visions of what remains and what might become of our planet's water. (Jan.)