Skip to main content

Bill Waters' Review of In the Dark, Soft Earth

Submitted by admin on
On Frank Watson’s In the Dark, Soft Earth
 
In the Dark, Soft Earth: Poetry of Love, Nature, Spirituality, and Dreams by Frank Watson. Plum White Press, 2020. RRP: $19.99 Pb; $29.99 Hc. 217pp. ISBN: 978-1-939832-20-7 Pb; 978-1-939832-19-1 Hc.
 
With a subtitle that promises poems of love, nature, spirituality, and dreams, Frank Watson’s book In the Dark, Soft Earth promises a lot — and delivers, in abundance.
 

Sharon Ann Jaeger's Review of In the Dark, Soft Earth

Submitted by admin on

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)

_____________________________________________________

Arlene Sanders' Review of In the Dark, Soft Earth

Submitted by admin on
In the Dark, Soft Earth by Frank Watson


          The brilliance of disordered magic. . . .
 
If you know genius when you see it, you will see it here.
 
A statement on the cover—the gorgeous cover— of Frank Watson’s In the Dark, Soft Earth describes his collection as “Poetry of Love, Nature, Spirituality, and Dreams". To me, this suggested praise of nature, heady language, peach-colored poppies blanketing fields. But this is not primarily that.
 

Julianne Davidow's Review of In the Dark, Soft Earth

Submitted by admin on

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.

Jim O'Loughlin's Review of In the Dark, Soft Earth

Submitted by admin on

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.

Philip Meersman's Review of In the Dark, Soft Earth

Submitted by admin on

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.

Brian Sheffield's Review of In the Dark, Soft Earth

Submitted by admin on

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.

Arthur Turfa's Review of In the Dark, Soft Earth

Submitted by admin on

     Divided into ten books and including a selection of carefully-chosen paintings, Watson creates a world of fantasy, wonder, and reflection. Of importance here are the concepts of rebirth and transformation.
     In particles, he writes of “all the dust/ that’s swept into/ the world’s wind/ and the particle/ that is me……reborn/ to the joy/ of another day.”
     In origins there is an allusion to Rilke’s Duino Elegies :

Subscribe to Book Reviews