The Sound of Light

Greg Watson


From a record store to a marathon to a newborn intensive care unit, Greg Watson's poems catalogue the intimate moments that fall just below the surface of a busy, modern world. By turns tender and elegiac, his sparse lines are filled with a quiet reverie that attempts to describe "the sound of light itself / asking to be recorded, / and no one around to do so / but me, a novice playing / the only way I know" ("And Learn to Sing Along").


Greg Watson's poems in The Sound of Light address the weather and the seasons of life and death. Yet they are all love poems, beautiful in their quiet knowing, that weathering life and its seasons, is how we love, and that not paying attention to all the beauty and hardship around us, is our death.

- Julia Klatt Singer, author of In the Dreamed of Places, A Tangled Path to Heaven, Untranslatable, and Elemental


Greg Watson accomplishes a rare balancing act in this collection, with poems that are both spare and deeply layered at the same time. In poems of loss, of love, of parenthood and of etched observation, his lines reveal the deep currents running beneath our dailiness. Acutely measured, profoundly abundant, and carefully orchestrated, The Sound of Light renders—to quote one of his many striking lines— “the great and noble stillness of a world reclaimed.”

- James Silas Rogers, author of The Collector of Shadows


ISBN 978-0-98293352-7       $14 US       Includes free shipping!

Greg Watson is the author of eight collections of poetry, including All the World at Once: New and Selected Poems, and co-editor with Richard Broderick of The Road by Heart: Poems of Fatherhood. He lives in St. Paul.

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