The Geometry of Wishes: Poems

by Randall Watson

Overview

In Randall Watson’s The Geometry of Wishes, as much a subtle narrative sequence as it is a collection of lyrical meditations, an ecstatic generosity arises from an elegiac base, moving through our inescapable patterns of loss to emerge as an invocation of our mutuality, our tenderness. Refusing easy sentiment, these poems, resonant and limber, traverse the complexities of longing that beguile us, deepening our lives, giving them both gravity and lightness.

Teaching Myself to Read

I want to call it autopsia,

I want to call it aubade,

I want to call it tenderness, return:


in the flower’s throat the history of bees

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680031621
Publisher:	Texas Review Press
Publication date:	01/26/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

RANDALL WATSON’s first book, Las Delaciones del Sueño, translated by Antonio Saborit and with a preface by Adam Zagajewski, was published in a bilingual edition by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico. His collection The Sleep Accusations received the 2004 Blue Lynx Poetry Award and his novella, Petals, under the heteronym Ellis Reece won the 2006-07 Quarterly West Novella Competition.  He is also the editor of The Weight of Addition, An Anthology of Texas Poetry, published by Mutabilis Press.

Table of Contents

• Teaching myself to Read

I

• Autumns Sonata (A Love Poem for Strangers)
• Emerging into Autumn from a Nantucket Cabana
• Once Grief Has Entered

II

• Trailways, August 28, 1963
• Great Plains Pastoral
• Ghost Month

III

• Shikoku Triptych
• The Dakini (1)
• The Dakini (2)

IV

• Treasure
• Dear Alice
• Nostalgia

V

• The Recital

VI

• Xalapa
• Refugee
• Mitla

VII

• Laurels from India (Oaxaca)
• Television
• Spanish Cairns

VIII

• Anatomy of Melancholy
• The Ukrainian Postman’s Spring Flowers
• As To The Tangerine

IX

• Transcompassion
• The Sabbath
• The Divers

 

• Acknowledgements

What People are Saying About This

Antonio Saborit

"The Geometry of Wishes is a cutting gem. Watson's poetic rests in the faith and ease of grasping the obscured light of reality out of those slippery moments which seem to refuse our entrance. Here is a world plucked from our most intimate landscapes, images and their evocations, rhythms shaped by the syncopated sounds of personal motions. Take "The Recital", one of the longest pieces here assembled, its unique blend of time and desire in the unreliable memory of a sobering storyteller. Watson searching, mastery in its joyous rise." —Antonio Saborit, writer and scholar

Adam Zagajewski

"These poems are hungry, hungry for images, for rapturous moments, for moments of compassion and friendship. Randall Watson is an ecstatic traveler, his poetry reinvigorates the world." —Adam Zagajewski, author of World Without End: New and Selected Poems

Dave Parsons

"After reading The Geometry of Wishes you will be called back to extraordinary meditative moments again and again. They are marvelously worldly in their gestures and scope. These introspections and close observations are always aware of and witness to the nature of our existence. After reading these poems, I am reminded of how I felt after reading Whitman's splendidly imagined flights or his walking studies of the pungent streets of a thriving city. And like Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, these poems bring the readers closer to out environments, both external and internal, as reflected in "The Recital," "...like the wildness we encounter in ourselves when we find, abruptly / and with the violence one might associate with rivers in the spring, / another person, unnamed and vital and strangely present..." There is a deep yearning satisfied in the reading of Randall Watson's poems." —Dave Parsons, 2011 Texas State Poet Laureate & author of Reaching For Longer Water

Editorial Reviews

"These poems are hungry, hungry for images, for rapturous moments, for moments of compassion and friendship. Randall Watson is an ecstatic traveler, his poetry reinvigorates the world." —Adam Zagajewski, author of World Without End: New and Selected Poems

"After reading The Geometry of Wishes you will be called back to extraordinary meditative moments again and again. They are marvelously worldly in their gestures and scope. These introspections and close observations are always aware of and witness to the nature of our existence. After reading these poems, I am reminded of how I felt after reading Whitman's splendidly imagined flights or his walking studies of the pungent streets of a thriving city. And like Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, these poems bring the readers closer to out environments, both external and internal, as reflected in "The Recital," "...like the wildness we encounter in ourselves when we find, abruptly / and with the violence one might associate with rivers in the spring, / another person, unnamed and vital and strangely present..." There is a deep yearning satisfied in the reading of Randall Watson's poems." —Dave Parsons, 2011 Texas State Poet Laureate & author of Reaching For Longer Water

"The Geometry of Wishes is a cutting gem. Watson's poetic rests in the faith and ease of grasping the obscured light of reality out of those slippery moments which seem to refuse our entrance. Here is a world plucked from our most intimate landscapes, images and their evocations, rhythms shaped by the syncopated sounds of personal motions. Take "The Recital", one of the longest pieces here assembled, its unique blend of time and desire in the unreliable memory of a sobering storyteller. Watson searching, mastery in its joyous rise." —Antonio Saborit, writer and scholar

From the Publisher