The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher

by Dawn Watson

In a sequence of poems set in the mountainous Deep South of America, Dawn Watson vividly evokes an ominous landscape of gas stations, jackrabbits and drifting hawks, where copperhead snakes fall out of branches and 'magnolia cones / thum[p] the roofs' of wooden outhouses. These poems, based on the writer's time spent in Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, are interwoven with pieces set in the poet's native Belfast which speak urgently to the raw realities of sexuality, juvenile detention, and the Irish border. Many poems feature speakers driving from place to place, capturing the in-between states in which so much of experience is actually lived. Precise and strange images coalesce into physical and interior landscapes. Alternately surreal and direct, and always joyously inventive, Watson offers a clear and unsettling vision of what is and isn't there in these anxious, contemporary times.

“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

36 pages, Paperback

Published June 6, 2019

About the author

Dawn is a writer from Belfast, Northern Ireland. She completed a PhD in poetry in 2022. Her debut book We Play Here is published by Granta Poetry, 2023. She is also the author of pamphlet The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher (The Emma Press). Dawn is a lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bookseller in Belfast gave me this (No Alibis bookstore). The poet is from Belfast and writes here of Belfast but also of the American South. Strange that "Chicken Wings" had the least connection to the US.

My favorite line from "Yellow Punkins on the Oolenoy": When i dislocated my collar bone, the doctor said: Strange, it is easier to break a bone than force it out of place."

[Faith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really my cup of tea overall, but I enjoyed the poems 'Chicken Wings', 'We Can Chat About It by Teletext Which I Know is Impossible', and 'The Sun is One Inch Above the Horizon'