All the World at Once by Greg Watson

by Greg Watson

Greg Watson's poetry carries an everyday eloquence that harbors elements of mystery and sangfroid by turns. There are times when it's difficult to tell one from the other, as images and thoughts develop with even-tempered grace. He is a master at evoking the silences that grow between lovers, the emotional undertow of gentle rain, the allure of shadows, and the bitter-sweet power of memories and mute artifacts to keep us chained to the past.The chief wonder of the body of work contained in this collection is how consistently playful and imaginative individual poems--many of them with seemingly dour subjects--turn out to be. The conceit at work may be architectural, as in ''Love Poem in Three Separate Rooms'' or ''In an Imaginary Barn Alone'' or it may be meterological, as in ''Mapping the Rain'' or ''Sounds Heard During an Afternoon Storm in September.'' There are occasional poems (''Elegy for the Hungry Mind Bookstore'') and love poems in which carnal elements develop a subtle metaphysical sheen (''When at Last Our Bodies Met''). One long sequence of short poems, ''Notes Upon the Silence,'' delves more pointedly into the Zen sensibility that often fuels the unexpected twists of the poet's more personal and literary themes.

Paperback

Reviews

[Say-Say · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not connect very much with how the contents were arranged. I seemed to enjoy part 3, 4, and 1 the most.

Usually I am pretty picky about poetry but the way he writes is similar to short stories; which I enjoy. They are sharp, witty, and have a few confusing or surprising ideas.

[Joel Van Valin · Rating 4 out of 5]

From my Whistling Shade review:
All the World at Once is a collection of new and selected poems by Greg Watson. Since the late ‘90s Watson has quietly published beautiful, effervescent poetry from his home in St. Paul. He has a magical way of turning ordinary moments of the ordinary world—with its hands, wrinkles, rain, empty rooms—into something time­less and filled with splendor. His best poems achieve a sort of free-fall, with lines coming unexpectedly from every direction and leading to “a somewhere not quite,” both familiar and strange. Take, for instance, the brooding “Pastoral”:

Then the postman arrived with the month
of November, everything
suddenly gray as snakestone.
The women covered their flesh, the leaves
shook hands with the devil.

Watson seems to keep his own life at arm’s length from his poetry; other than a few elegiac poems to a brother who died young, no particular personage or history confront us in All the World at Once, though a nebulous “she” often appears, as in the gorgeous “Washing Her Hair”, where he lathers

her wet tangles of hair,
small bells of water
on shoulder and neck
drinking the light
one by one, as she smiles
knowingly

Perhaps the magic in Watson’s poetry lies in the very fact that it is not tied to him—any one of us could find ourselves in the middle of one of his poems, on any given day.