Reviews
"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, 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
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….”