One should read Frank Watson’s In the Dark, Soft Earth slowly, relishing each page, each poem, each visual image, for the collection is a series of meditations evoked from a variety of paintings by such artists as Seurat, Magritte, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Henri Rousseau. and others.  The paintings haunt the landscape of the poems, setting their tone; the poet often extends the visual image of color and other images from the visual into language. 

Frank Watson. In the Dark, Soft Earth: Poetry of Love, Nature, Spirituality, and Dreams.  Plum White Press, 232 pp. 

Publication Date: July 7, 2020

Paperback $19.99 (ISBN: 9781939832207)

Hardcover $29.99 (ISBN: 9781939832191)

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The newest collection of poems by Frank Watson, In The Dark, Soft Earth, speaks of the ephemeral yet enduring quality of love, the power of longing, the reality of not being able to quite hold onto anything in this world. Although this yearning for things that are fleeting is poignant, it also helps us to become aware of who we truly are.

Book Review for In the Dark, Soft Earth
By Frank Watson
Plum White Press, © 2020
231 pages
Review by Vanessa Shields

In the Dark, Soft Earth
By Frank Watson

A REVIEW BY JACK RANDOM

From blood & bones

“I have lived a hundred lives / and will die a hundred times more”

From the title poem

“and I wait for you / in this life and the next”

In the Dark, Soft Earth by Frank Watson. Plum White Press. 2020.
reviewed by Jim O’Loughlin

In the Dark, Soft Earth is a pleasure to both read and view. Its combination of thematically connected poems and reproductions of classic paintings is well conceived and the source of unanticipated insights.

The poetry in In the Dark, Soft Earth are like paintings made by the avant-gardes of the 19th and early 20th century.
This collection of poems could as well be a series of texts in an exhibition catalogue of a museum dedicated to the avant-garde. The paintings in the book form a welcome visual pause to the condensed language screaming for attention on the white page.
In this collection the poet has observed the techniques of the avant-garde movements through a magnifying glass and reproduced them.

Frank Watson's poetry sits in that strange place where the immediate and the past mingle, "like wind / that whistles / a melody / from another time." At first, it speaks to a kind of deeper ancestral memory -- or rather, those small infinities that seem to exist in moments that have always been, and always will be: the way "music sleeps / between the leaves." Everywhere here, there seems to be a recognition of something that came long before him.