A Watchful Astronomy

ISBN-13: 9781781724071 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 72 str.

Paul Deaton

Opis

Paul Deaton's eagerly awaited debut poetry collection, A Watchful Astronomy, from Seren Books, 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 guises: as a vast unfathomable mountain 'Inselberg Father', as an approaching thunderstorm, as a mood: "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. Nature is also a guiding presence in this collection, and is turned to and acts as one place that can 'hold'. It is often embodied by a wintery landscape, as in 'December' where the 'sun's cranberry coal/ glisters low in the grate' and a tree's upper leaves are like a "thicket of primed spears." We also often find ourselves poised at the edges of a view, either urban or rural, as if always at some precipice of day or night, city or countryside. We are rooted to a dark street or lingering sleepless at a window frame, but always looking up and out in anticipation of understanding or change. This book's totem animal is the 'Owl' flying with a "silk-slow hush" and ..".now near and present, as if it landed on my shoulder." The 'Watchful' of the title is emblematic of the tone here and throughout. Moments of unfettered joy, even of exhilaration, as in 'The Coffin Hut' where "We have slept a night/and the whole sky has cartwheeled over us" are the more highly prized for being rare, so unstinting is the author's impulse to cool accuracy, to honest emotion, to realist modes of thought and description.