A Watchful Astronomy

Paul Deaton's eagerly awaited debut poetry collection, A Watchful Astronomy, collects many of the pieces that have appeared in magazines and in an early pamphlet, Black Knight (Eyewear). Deaton's poems are finely attuned and alert to the tensions in relationships, partly attributable to a difficult father figure, 'like a wounded bear', who haunts much of this book. This father arises in various guises: as a vast unfathomable mountain 'Inselberg Father', as an approaching thunderstorm, as a mood: "he mauled us with his gloom". Yet however unsparingly the descriptions, there is also an overall perspective of compassion rather than resentment, an understanding that those who wound others are themselves often wounded in some central way.