A Watchful Astronomy

by Paul Deaton

Paul Deaton’s eagerly awaited debut poetry collection, A Watchful Astronomy , collects many of the pieces that have appeared in magazines and in an early pamphlet, Black Knight (Eyewear). Deaton’s poems are finely attuned and alert to the tensions in relationships, partly attributable to a difficult father figure, ‘like a wounded bear’, who haunts much of this book. This father arises in various as a vast unfathomable mountain ‘Inselberg Father’, as an approaching thunderstorm, as a “he mauled us with his gloom”. Yet however unsparingly the descriptions, there is also an overall perspective of compassion rather than resentment, an understanding that those who wound others are themselves often wounded in some central way.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

Paul Deaton, raised in Wales, now lives in Bristol. A Watchful Astronomy (Seren, October 2017) his debut collection, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and National Poetry Day selected title. He won a Society of Authors Award in 2019. And has most recently co-edited an anthology of running poems, with Ben Wilkinson & Kim Moore, published by The Poetry Business.

On ‘A Watchful Astronomy’

‘Each poem in this collection is like a little torchlight ... I felt like it totally wrapped me up as a reader, and I really couldn’t put it down.’ – Jen Campbell, Sunday Times author / blogger