Kathleene West’s Water Witching is a book from a diviner, a poet who explores her environment for the necessities of survival, a search that began with her first major collection of poems, Land Bound. A native of the Great Plains, West writes with an unsentimental clarity, shaped by her years on a Nebraska farm, where courage and humor develop as necessary skills. The personae of her poems bravely struggle against the awkwardness of human relationships in urban, rural or wilderness landscapes, but find grace and comfort only when they surrender themselves to the inevitable cycles of existence, cycles that can be acknowledged in places as particular as the Lighthouse Cafe, Ruby Beach, and Skeedee Creek or within vistas that evoke the eternities of mythology.