Greg Watson's poetry collection, a product of Duluth's Holy Cow! Press, just hit shelves last month. The St. Paul writer's Finnish heritage is central to these poems, which touch on the author's childhood and his experiences raising a young daughter. The first poem is about watching a storm with his child ("we are snug and secure in this boat of a bed"), with the second chronicling a Finnish funeral in Aitkin circa 1939 (the Finnish language, Watson writes, offers "many words to describe the existential weight of snow and ice, but lacks all future tense").
As specific as the poems are, they also touch on universal experiences — as well as those shared among all of us who call Minnesota home. One poem is titled "Why I Live in a Cold Climate." Among the reasons: "Because you can follow the tracks of those who have trudged through the snow before you, making a path for others yet to come" (holycowpress.org).
--Jay Gabler, arts and entertainment reporter, Duluth News-Tribune
It couldn’t have been much, whatever/could be tossed into two plastic garbage bags/and carried, from the station wagon/to the front porch of our new foster home. — from “Stars Unseen”
St. Paulite Greg Watson’s poem “What We Carried With Us” is one of several in his new collection that harks back to his difficult childhood, including a disturbed mother, a missing father, a stepfather who abused him, and always moving when the rent was raised, unless he and his brother were in foster care. And then there’s the scary grandfather who left prison to come home to die. He recalls stories of how a grandfather lost a finger and how farmers looked as they carried a coffin. Many of the poems pay tribute, in one way or another, to his Finnish ancestors.
Watson’s hardship memories lead to a through-line in the collection — his determination to make his daughter feel safe and loved. “I never wanted for you, dearest daughter,/to be anything other than the beautiful and sensitive/soul you have always been.”
Watson, who began writing poetry as a coping mechanism (why he did so is clear in the book), has released nine full-length poetry titles and three chapbooks. He is also celebrating publication of another collection, “The Days Between,” in which he spends time with his lost brother, his losses, his memories of different kinds and qualities of love. Published by Utah-based Kelsay Books.
- Mary Ann Grossmann, Book Editor, Pioneer Press
“Poets can inspire, delight, cajole, rant, mourn, reveal, arouse, enthrall, narrate, or just plain astonish. Greg Watson, he’s a conductor. Like Dante’s Virgil, he’s always present with a guiding hand, but never gets in the way of what he’s showing you. And in his new collection Stars Unseen, we travel on many different levels, diving into a thrift store, strolling past a deer nibbling in a cemetery, attending a naturalization ceremony. In “Searching for the Poet’s Grave”, for instance, our conductor tells us:
They are searching for Lorca’s remains again
today, their big yellow machinery
nudging and clawing at the silent earth
But it is as if we ourselves see the workers
coming back empty handed, the shapes of
new countries emerging through their shirt-sweat
while the poet just goes on dreaming.
Watson conducts us into his own life as well—his Finnish ancestry, his unsteady mother who found religion, the older brother who could be a bully, his beloved daughter, his growing up amid poverty and tumult. “What We Carried With Us” has a heartbreaking list of items he would take with him to a new foster home:
We carried our toothbrushes and combs,
clothes and underwear, carried whatever toys
or stuffed animal could be retrieved,
while the cacophony of sirens sped our comatose
mother to the cold comfort of hospital rooms
Although Watson’s laid-back verses do not call attention to themselves, notice the procession of “co” and “ca” sounds: combs, clothes, carried, could, cacophony, comatose, cold, comfort. Perhaps it’s this sparse but subconsciously powerful artistry that makes the poem more than a mere confessional.
Though a more down-to-earth collections, Stars Unseen still has mystical, lyrical touches that recall Watson’s earlier work:
The world is not my home, they are singing,
so happy to only be passing through.
But I don’t know what could be better than
this—the earth that accepts us again
(from “Baptism”)
These lines echo Robert Frost’s comment in “Birches” that “Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it's likely to go better.”
Despite the dark paths traveled, Greg Watson’s compassion and understanding are always there, like glimmering stars, to guide us on our way. ”
— Joel Van Valin, Author, Founding Editor and Publisher, Whistling Shade Literary Journal
"Greg Watson’s Stars Unseen is built around snapshots of images and verse. It works with light and shadow as it captures scenes and sounds—silence, whispers, and song. Throughout, Watson proves himself to be a reliable and keen observer of the familial. He’s 'gazing out of winter windows, taking notes,' as he always does so well. He’s building art from love, happiness, difficult truths, and harsh realities. Poem by poem, Stars Unseen maintains an essential and sustaining balance. It sees 'the very sweetness of this world — worthy of every possible risk.’”
--Michael Kleber-Diggs, author of Worldly Things
"The more I read the poems, the more convinced I am of its emotional depth and breadth. Your poems are a healing balm for a world filled with violence and human tragedy. Thank you for your courage in sharing with raw honesty the many dimensions that make up the complexity of the human family."
- Jim Perlman, Founding Editor and Publisher, Holy Cow! Press
“Greg Watson finds poetry in the small moments around him, the details that build his world. The men walking down Grand Ave, the coffee at the Bad Habit Café, the girls at the Uptown Diner ... He writes about true love, lost love, crow dust, dark eyes, coffee grounds, deep autumn, and ancient photographs.”
— Heather McElhatton, Minnesota Public Radio
*EXERPT* Read full review here
“Greg Watson's work is lovely, straightforward poetry, easy for poetry novices to read but still rewarding for more practiced readers. All his books explore a mood or experience in related short poems, imagistic and moving. Ideal gift books, as almost any reader can enjoy these poems.”
- Lightsey Darst, Minnesota Book Award-winning author of Find the Girl and Dance
“Greg Watson is always an exciting read. He writes from the soul, a gifted soul wise in the ways of poetry. If you're in the market for 'workshop poems,' this is not the place to look.”
— Albert Huffstickler, author of Why I Write in Coffee Houses and Diners: Selected Poems
"Greg Watson is the rare treat: a poet who brings us to both grief and exultation in a single line. His work is a map of human life: brief yet timeless. His perfect, perfect words will lodge in your soul and psyche — and you will be temporally, eternally grateful for their beauty and wisdom."
Greg Watson’s The Distance Between Two Hands is influenced by many sources ranging from poets like Pablo Neruda to minimalism to the Bible to Asian thought and writing style, plus more. If you like a unique reading experience, this book is right for you.
"Greg Watson's poems in The Sound of Light address the weather and the seasons of life and death. Yet they are all love poems, beautiful in their quiet knowing, that weathering life and its seasons, is how we love, and that not paying attention to all the beauty and hardship around us, is our death."
- Julia Klatt Singer, author of In the Dreamed of Places, A Tangled Path to Heaven, Untranslatable, and Elemental
"Greg Watson accomplishes a rare balancing act in this collection, with poems that are both spare and deeply layered at the same time. In poems of loss, of love, of parenthood and of etched observation, his lines reveal the deep currents running beneath our dailiness. Acutely measured, profoundly abundant, and carefully orchestrated, The Sound of Light renders — to quote one of his many striking lines — “the great and noble stillness of a world reclaimed.”
- James Silas Rogers, author of The Collector of Shadows
"Things You Will Never See Again, a collection of poetry by St. Paul’s Greg Watson, is dedicated to the memory of Mark Allen Cole, and one cannot help but read the book through the lens of this dedication. Even the title suggests that the poems are a kind of report to his [brother] on how the world looks after his death.
But the work is not uniformly sad, by any means; nor are the poems “confessional” or filled with personal detail. Most of the work is brief and lyrical, with attention to sound and the natural image. Though the setting for most of the poems is urban, they are inhabited by sycamores, sparrows, elms, crows, fish, rivers and lakes—and the wind blows through them, and they are rain-washed..."
- Connie Wanek, author of Consider the Lilies , review written for Walker Art MN Artists
*EXERPT* Read full review here
Tim Nolan observes that Watson’s poems “begin in the domestic usual and end up somewhere else -- the universal extraordinary.”
Poet Laureate Carol Connolly calls Watson’s work “sympathetic poems, romantic, kind and brave poems….”