pray me stay eager

November 20, 2017
In her lively and thoughtful fifth collection, Watson (Dogged Hearts) considers the characteristics of and what is contained within such grand abstractions as loyalty, humility, disquiet, and jealousy. To unpack words that try to abstract “everything,” Watson includes three “Field Guides to Abstraction” and odes to several specific concepts. One Watson prizes appears in the penultimate poem: “I want eager. Pray me. Astonishment. I’m courting/ this best of abstractions.” Other poems feature list fragments, dialogues, proofs, and prayers. These poems can be remarkably sassy, as in the closing lines for “April Eclogue,” when Watson writes, “You say we’re all shameless with it—ongoingness./ I sigh, set my jaw, I mean to green into my wreckage.” She simultaneously attends to words and wordplay—and the larger narratives set up by such titles as “Learning to Sail at 57 on Father’s Day.” Towards the end of “Hermitage” Watson writes, “This is not strictly a story”—and she’s right, it isn’t. These poems are musical meditations on what cannot be narrated, but must be prayed or sung: “I who don’t pray/ want to prayer you to the next/ world, wondering will I be this/ stubborn?”

Starred review from January 1, 2018

After Dogged Hearts, Watson's masterly new collection crafts big, authoritative poems with a knack for interrogating her own word choices even as she mines the spaces in between for connection and feeling. The language is rich and rhythmic yet also solid and workaday. There's nothing self-congratulatory or showy; its strength derives from the poet's connection to the world, driving each line and creating urgency so that readers turn the page to see what else she has paused to consider, celebrate, or mourn. Take for instance, the poem "Mother Going Gone": "Year after year you keep on being gone, gone/ after years and years of gone, of marginal, mute, / vacant, of breathing, and then, within minutes, a shy/ descent, some huffs and stutters, and a hushing/ to waxen, no, to stone-gone, finally unloosed/ (to our tired, to our relief) to revisit us--gleeful/ earnest, jigging you, who I've worn on my left pinky." VERDICT A top selection for readers seeking a collection filled with meaning and surprise; Watson, an accomplished poet and writer with many credits to her name, does not disappoint.--Iris S. Rosenberg, New York

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