pray me stay eager
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"These are wonderful, witty, wise poems in love with language and singing the music of the world with all its pleasures and piquancies, its oddities and tragedies. Ellen Doré Watson's vision is agile with quick shifts in direction and vivid juxtapositions. The poems in pray me stay eager contain multitudes!" —Ellen Bass
A dreamy voice turns dark and gritty as Ellen Doré Watson interrogates personal purpose in the face of looming mortality. Poems sway comfortably, fluidly through associative discourse, radiating and championing love and adoration, indulging in simple pleasures with high magnitude and deep resonance. These poems are musical and sing in a different register for Watson in her fifth collection.
Ellen Doré Watson is the author of four full-length collections of poems, most recently Dogged Hearts from Tupelo Press. Watson's journal appearances include APR, Tin House, Orion, Field, Ploughshares and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and to Yaddo, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Watson serves as poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review and core faculty at Drew University's Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Poetry and Translation. She is the director of the Poetry Center and the Poetry Concentration at Smith College.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her lively and thoughtful fifth collection, Watson (Dogged Hearts) considers the characteristics of and what is contained within such grand abstractions as loyalty, humility, disquiet, and jealousy. To unpack words that try to abstract "everything," Watson includes three "Field Guides to Abstraction" and odes to several specific concepts. One Watson prizes appears in the penultimate poem: "I want eager. Pray me. Astonishment. I'm courting/ this best of abstractions." Other poems feature list fragments, dialogues, proofs, and prayers. These poems can be remarkably sassy, as in the closing lines for "April Eclogue," when Watson writes, "You say we're all shameless with it ongoingness./ I sigh, set my jaw, I mean to green into my wreckage." She simultaneously attends to words and wordplay and the larger narratives set up by such titles as "Learning to Sail at 57 on Father's Day." Towards the end of "Hermitage" Watson writes, "This is not strictly a story" and she's right, it isn't. These poems are musical meditations on what cannot be narrated, but must be prayed or sung: "I who don't pray/ want to prayer you to the next/ world, wondering will I be this/ stubborn?"
