Reviews
"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
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“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
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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….”