Ladder Music
Ellen Doré Watson
The jazzy lyric poems in Ladder Music carry the reader through familiar territory, but the recognizable terrain of love, work and family are transformed by Ellen Doré Watson's sensuous ebullience. Whether celebrating a peach, addressing a dead rat on the path, or meditating on a truckload of guns, she finds the perfect pitch, balancing edgy tempos and sassy rhythms, effortlessly improvised, in a delicious voice unmistakably freighted with experience and wisdom. Hers is a voice undeterred by the inevitable bouts of "Imperfect Knowledge" or "Doubting Instinct," as two of the poems are titled—the voice of one who knows that "under the lawn the gnawed / bulbs keep on preparing yellow." Watson constructs poems that have a dazzling, quick-footed virtuosity, but also at their hearts a kind of hushed clarity, where the boisterous or sorrowful business of dailiness is resolved for a moment in a single sure note. Profoundly & quirkily attuned to the world around her, this poet sets about the work of hands, mind and heart, celebrating the self-conscious, art-making human animal we are.
"It is precisely Watson’s poetic willingness to be subverted, both emotionally and formally, that makes this collection so valuable. One finishes it with the impression of a fiery, intrepid voice turning and turning over the images and things of this world looking for hope and love, but always suspicious of both, and always suspicious of easy expression."
—Poet Lore
"Ellen Watson writes 'I can't see but I quarry': these new poems, like the inner and outer worlds she quarries and sees, are oftentimes strange, surprising, and
wise."
—Jean Valentine
"Ellen Doré Watson has the wonderful ability to translate idea, emotion and her keen view of the world into verbal energy and rich patterns of sound. Her
poems bang about on the page and are a great pleasure to read."
—Stephen Dobyns
about the author
Ellen Doré Watson directs the Poetry Center at Smith College and serves as poetry editor for The Massachusetts Review. She is the author of four books of poems, including two from Alice James, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York Award. Her most recent collection, This Sharpening, was published by Tupelo Press. Individual poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker.
She was named by Library Journal one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century.” Among her other honors are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She has translated a dozen books from the Portuguese, including The Alphabet in the Park, the selected poems of Brazilian Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press).
Author photo by Robin Todd
review of ladder music from kingdom books
also by ellen doré watson: we live in bodies
