Study for the World’s Body
from a painting by R.B. Kitaj

The dancer’s face is chalk-white and flat,
the window behind her full of winter,
its weight and persistence
cut and removed from the walls red as the guts of a pomegranate,
red as the heart
we remember from childhood.

Her long, thin fingers, practice and elegant,
rest upon his shoulder this man,
his face hot with blood and motion, whose dark visage
has emerged, angular as a doorframe, from
the four corners of the room.

But the hand appears detached,
hovering
or emerging from the wall
a ghost-hand, perhaps, belonging to neither,
but to a third who moves between them
and measures the distance their movements have made,
and how long the earth will be gone
before it returns
to find them here again.

ISBN 1-59661-049-2
82 pages $15

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

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. —Mary Petrie

Greg Watson is a poet and artist whose work has appeared widely in literary publications, including The Seattle Review, Sulphur River Literary Review, and Writer's Journal. His most recent collections are Cold Water Memory (2001) and Pale Light from a Distant Room (2004), both published by March Street Press. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

A review from MNArtists.

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 friend 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. Watson evokes the natural landscape through lyrical metaphor, as in these first lines of “The Silence of City Streets”:

The silence of asphalt, like the silence
of large water, weighted with age
and expectation, bears the namesake of all
our departures…

Occasionally the lines relax into prose—the book begins with a prose poem—but mostly they are spare. Watson has enough confidence as a poet to allow a brief, but dense thought to stand as a very short poem, as in “Credo,” presented here in its entirety:

Never turn away from
a blessing
no matter how
severe.

As suggested by the quotation from the Dalai Lama which precedes the first poem, the theme in these pages is impermanence. Even a poem like “A Brief Encounter,” which turns on one of those small miracles of the imagination, shares this central notion. It’s a lovely poem, nine lines, swift and sure. Watson has a keen eye and ear: in “Sounds Heard During an Afternoon Storm in September” he says the shadows are “woolish” and the rain sounds “like a litter of cats/ lapping from the same milk bowl.”

Many of the poems work the way a Zen koan does, presenting a paradox or small riddle that must be solved, not through rational thought, but through acceptance and reconciliation of contradictory truths. One feels that the poet, too, is seeking as he writes, and that this process is more the point than any conclusion he may draw. Too, we find the impulse of the Buddhist toward humility: Watson says

Each time I re-write
my epitaph, it requires
fewer and fewer
words.

Occasionally a pair of adjectives or an adverb seems unnecessarily decorative, as here in “Monument”: “The thick and stately oak…casting small, bird-like shadows/ in the feminine, overgrown grass.” Part of this is writing style. But too many modifiers, rather than clarifying, can cloud a poem’s effect.

Overall, though, the poems are penetrating and rewarding. Things You Will Never See Again is Watson’s third book from March Street Press. In an era when readers’ patience is often tested by baggy narrative poetry, it’s refreshing to read poems that move directly toward an essential conclusion.

—Connie Wanek, a poet from Duluth, recently awarded the Witter Bynner Fellowship in poetry (given by the Library of Congress). Her collections of poetry are “Bonfire” (1997), which won the New Rivers Press’ New Voices competition; and “Hartley Field” (2002), published by Holy Cow! Press.

Turns out it's not the river
That's crooked, but the mind
That draws its path along
The water's edge.

And in "Credo" we learn to:

Never turn away from
A blessing,
No matter how
Severe.

Watson is quiet and reflective of the world around him, reminding us what we as readers need to take note of. Nature takes on a personal form as the author describes the leaves as talking and carrying on a conversation with the wind. Sights and sounds of nature abound as the poet tells us that “the leaves that gather beneath the sycamore are murmuring again, those low, caustic tones, one or two bristling in protest.”

One of my favorites in the collection is "To Wake". There is no mention of characters or plots, but by reading the poem I can imagine there is a story full of mystery and drama hidden behind it.

It is late, the moon is hidden,
The houses lying still,
A distant crack of thunder
Breaking just beyond the horizon.
It is the sound of old wooden ships
Setting forth grudgingly,
The heavy pull of oars,
The stubborn wood shifting.
This is the sound that will carry me off to sleep, or further,
Receding vaguely
Into the thick, wet pulse
Of night, and again
To wake.

Things You Will Never See Again can be viewed as a collection of declarations on the transient nature of life. Many events in our [lives] are a collection of memories, never more to be seen again, but never forgotten.

—Rhonda Niola