The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher
The Emma Press (June 2019)
The poems in The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher are set in Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and the poet’s native Belfast, featuring speakers who drive from place to place and capturing the in-between states in which so much of experience is actually lived. Their way of creating a physical and interior landscape through image is deft, and their Southern, mountain, cracked visionary feel is exactly evocative of a rural, regional culture sort of washing up on the ruinous shore of the 21st century. Precise and strange images coalesce into physical and interior landscapes. Always joyously inventive, Watson offers a clear and unsettling vision of what is and isn’t there with unexpected surrealism which is ominous and beautiful at once.
‘Watson’s juxtaposition of the realistic and metaphorical is ever- surprising. This short collection showcases a huge range of skills and topics, but most of all, Dawn Watson’s powerful imagination and slanted world view.’
— The London Grip
‘Watson’s poems consider positions of uncertainty as a valid and important ideological standpoint. These poems think seriously about anxiety, and rightly so, given their attention to a queer life in Northern Ireland, and to same-sex parenting […] Watson is a skilled technician. ‘Hello, I Am Alive’ demonstrates Watson’s utter ease with maintaining the long poem, with vernacular aplomb.’
— Michéal McCann, Ambit magazine
‘I read this book with gathering excitement to have found a new writer I love, and relief that someone is writing poems like these. The music of Dawn Watson’s poems – pointy-beaked, just acutely alive – feels necessary to this moment. It is a music that rises from wit, daring, and weird, beautiful yarns.’
— Ashleigh Young
‘Droll, unsettling, never dull, there is a rare effervescence to Dawn Watson’s poems which fizzes with curiosity and wit.’
— Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Dawn Watson 