Such a calm and compelling title. Rare, in my reading, for an epigraph to lead the reader so clearly into the narrator's ways of seeing and feeling the world. Greg Watson's faith in the reader-to catch his tone, to begin to understand his preoccupations, his visions, his losses-all this is moving. I think we feel acknowledged, but we also know he is traveling with "half-finished maps,"
and with "steadfast allegiance to beauty," and we readers are with him, but he is with his familiars, his lost brother, his double shadow, his losses, his memories of different kinds and qualities of love, his old notebooks carrying old news and truths, the return of the act of drawing to his life, and, most essential to this collection, the daughter, and all the birds he listens for and notices. These small birds, spirit messengers, singers and tiny charms against certain darkness, are made real in Watson's poems. A foster father, beloved, is made real to us in a tribute; what the poet acknowledges he has lost is made real to us in poems-what the narrator still believes in-made real in this collection. Watson is the author of several wonderful poetry books, and this book joins that group, a book written by a grown-up, who thinks and feels deeply, inside all the days between. A beautiful book.
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Deborah Keenan
, author of eleven collections of poetry, including
The Saint of Everything
and
from tiger to prayer