The Watchful Eye

Anne Waters Green’s compelling new book of poems, The Watchful Eye, rewards the reader with the offering of incisive, pithy, straightforward poems. The voice is clear, devoid of sentiment, and older, in the best sense, in that it carries the gravitas of having lived many years. The poems range over landscapes, many southern, from Georgia to the Carolinas, illuminating the natural world with its “queue of turtles,” fireflies, (“its lamp-lit tail frantic,”) its hummingbirds, wrens, cormorants, pelicans, “huddling deer,” and the details of its landscapes, “salt-pruned oaks.” The images tucked into these poems celebrate the natural world with marvelous phrasing.

The book’s richness is amplified by a sense of personal history, from child to elder, but also the nation’s history, the fight for feminist autonomy, Thomas Jefferson, the Biblical Queen Vashti.  There are surprises within the language; in a poem that refers to the ceiling of a screened porch: “I wonder how blue paint / can block the spirit world / if blue skies cannot.” Green has reached a level of skill in which her language comes fluently. The book takes us on an elegaic journey, from a time when quilting hooks from which to hang a quilting frame were “screwed” in a parlor’s ceiling, to an ever-watchful, present, eye. “An anhinga … displays / feathers arranged like piano keys.”  The signature voice can be ironic, wry, close to comic, but always celebratory. “Mother died with her lipstick on.”  And this poet is “game to carry on.”      

Tina Barr, author of Pink Moon