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Synopsis

A Tupelo Masters Series Book
with Companion CD

In her fifth collection of poems, Ellen Doré Watson lends her supple voice to a multiplicity of characters, each with his or her own particular dilemma, distraction, or disarray: Junie biking home to find a new mom, Edur wondering whether he’s anyone’s father, a pregnant teen starving herself to lose the fetus, or the widower Lew buoyed by a vision of his wife after her death. With a novelist’s finesse and a poet’s details, Watson creates lives that resonate with poignancy and urgency.

In Dogged Hearts Ellen Doré Watson demonstrates a capacious talent for invention and empathy and, with her incomparable linguistic brio, gives us an unforgettable look at how loss and disconnection can usher in chance-to-change reverie and unexpected veerings towards life.

Advance Praise for Dogged Hearts:

The poems are wild, delirious—they go every which way—yet the (smart) organizing principle is this mind, ever alert, choosing and sorting, saving and abandoning, given up to passion and knowledge. Dogged Hearts is a powerful and wise book.

—Gerald Stern

These intensely lyrical, very physical poems batter their way forward, embodiments of the struggle to keep emotionally alive; Dogged Hearts reminds us why the arts are called the humanities: because they remind us how to be human.

—Tony Hoagland

‘…dear rash world so far / outside my window….’ Well, not that far, in these wily, intricate poems, because so many radiant voices live here—old, young, the living, the dead—plus all gorgeous manner of trees and stones and birds. A kind of glad lush chaos hits again and again in this work.

—Marianne Boruch

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Awards

2010 ForeWord Book of the Year Finalist

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Selected Poems

Fireflies at the Altar The air here does kind of taste like lemons, thought the boy in the hammock, swaying his way to the future. The bride would be dead within the year, everyone in their finery knew this. Which was why she brought the boy along, nestled in yellow petals that trembled with each footfall. She’d invented him exactly three days after diagnosis, whispering to her ovaries as she fingered childhood photos of the man waiting now on the altar, all full of this wedding and the way he would hold her. The gathered ones gaped at the gray of her, the size of his love. She cared less for its heft than for his knowing how to tame it: sex, the purest kind of barely-touching. Now her body was in her dress, the ring was sliding onto her finger. Everyone watching her become “one” with the man who couldn’t come along. Fire raging in the room above his head, the boy dreamed he was brushing his teeth with fireflies, which were not hot, but yellow, dry, and feathery. Lew’s Late Love The fourth month flowers waxy and small. Grief is like sleeping in water, he thinks. Like throwing light onto the smallest stone. It is like scolding a doorjamb for crushing a finger in third grade. Her finger. Now in the ground. The same one she fractured flying off a treadmill the day her first husband walked away. Why these vignettes that long preceded him, now, his ninety-first day without her? Long week after week in a world now narrow. A runner instead of a proper rug. If he could stand her there, across the disbelieving room, he’d ask, all sheepish, how she was doing without hunger. He can hear her smile: “Look at the lake. Tell me I can’t have it.” What Tess Wants A wooden bowl, fragrant oil, and a good half hour. Cello to accompany a careful task, not one draught. Please, not a forest but a bevy of single trees. Oh and I want him far away or at least his anger. Like that voice that says we’ll be erased when we hang up, I wish he would. I wish he’d stop painting the house and discover color. I want my arms heavy with sun like boughs with snow and everyone’s heads to stop hurting. I want a weeded house, an ocean a month, time with my spice grinder. I’d like one day someone new to make me supper. I don’t want to feel marinated or married, but yes, one flower — wild — worthy of a vase. Edith’s Roofer Dream Raw day, and I’m practically up in the clouds next to some hard-hat hollering to another over din of metal, smell of tar. The second guy grins back: Verbal abuse is nine-tenths of the law! Swear to God. Yeah, I guess I’m invisible—and plus somehow I know at home on his dresser in a heap of change is the key to a box he’s terrified to open. Where does this stuff come from? Meanwhile, a third man, heavyset, stoops in the rubble, pretends to search for something, but really he’s worrying about how to fix the membrane between him and the world, recently torn, letting stuff leak in and out. Whaddaya mean you didn’t wanna be a roofer? booms a voice from above. Noon whistle shrieks. All the guys on site grab their lunch boxes, sit in a ragged circle. Remove their shirts, thermoses, and Tupperware and—I kid you not—burst into tears. Decade Parade The Broker adored Hildegard of Bingen— but was a pussycat like my ex before the X. Flannel Shirt was into conspiracy theories and Sportswriter wanted a wife bad— and found one a couple weeks after I passed on the job. Bob #2 had some cockamamie ideas about harnessing sexual energy. I knew he was right, but he so wasn’t. Head of Hair wore a retainer and funny underwear. None of them could be called Que Será or sidelong or had, to my knowledge, a tattoo. One had a performance problem and resembled Howard Dean (neither of which was the problem). Junior partner had a head of hair, too, but O so much blather. No, I’m not a bitch and yes have many flaws, but the old friend is way too old a friend and the high school geek, while handsome now, is still one. Three ex-wives or permanently single, the whole lot of them were too damned something. That slow food activist, though, he saw through me in a way I don’t yet get. Which has me considering invisibility— a counter-intuitive and possibly counter- productive strategy, but maybe a good cover, as I scan the crowd for a tattooed, bald widower not named Bob, reluctant, loose- limbed, and wearing linen, who gives good talk.

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Reviews

Watson’s skill here, as on so many pages, is to be accessible and kinetic while seeing something new in a common experience. Her sight is so unique, her inner editor so keen, that she brings a prismatic freshness to what eye and her 'dogged heart' confront.

—Barbara Berman, The Rumpus