published by Sugar Mountain Press

Klyd Watkins has accomplished a quiet miracle with Ghost Trees. Long poems are frequently difficult to follow, their lines leading into obtuse cul-de-sacs, and petering out in the midst of weeds and brambles, but the poetic path he has established here pulls the eyes and brain and heart of even the casual reader along with him as he traverses the earthly ethereal trails winding around the shores of his chosen subject, Radnor Lake. His lines crackle with energy; he has great fun with the language. At times, Watkins almost appears to be dancing widdershins just a few steps ahead of us, a pastoral Tennessee Gandalf exercising his laughing craft to free the everyday eternity locked in wood and water. Ghost Trees is a short but significant vision quest from which the reader will not return untouched or unchanged. -- C Ra McGuirt, Editor, Penny Dreadful Review

" i have had a degree of affection for trees, but reading "Ghost Trees" has opened up
a beautiful new avenue of thought for me. Klyd Watkins love for trees has spilled
over onto me........ This book is . . . food for the brain & spirit both,
......" Curtis D. Rose 10*2*98

". . . masterful. So much interweaves so quietly inside it I couldn’t begin to discuss it. It has lift; like the shield Haephaestos
makes for Achilles in the Iliad, the helicopter in the middle of Ghost Trees works as a synopsis sampling, not of plot, but of
the way the poet handles the relation of time to stillness and motion." Jan Fiering, The Time Garden

"Ghost Trees stands on its own." P.W. Lea

"You knocked it out of the park with that one." David Pointer

Tue, 28 Oct 2003 04:42:46 -0800--
Klyd, This morning post poem myself I turned to The Time Garden and re-read the opening to Ghost Trees and for all I know heard it for the first time and marveled at it, and at the end found Stephen T's review and read that, what good sense to counterbalance the madness our colonial leadership has squandered us in. I will point this out to Jeremy [Gaulke] this morning, who reads like a river anxious for the sea. He may recognize something of himself in it, as he once wrote, "the wood we used for the fire was older than any of us," and you so adroitly note that burning a tree still doesn't dissolve its spirit. I garbled that but I'll return and get it right. I can see where the affinity is coming from, the same wellspring of prayer, burn me god I'm still full of shit.
Good morning,
Charles Potts

"the outdoors atmosphere, as though a breeze were blowing the lines this way and that, a dripping rain accounting for the varios line-lengths . . . . organic, filled with spitits, blown by the wind" John Berbrich in Barbaric Yawp

"What a terrific poem!" Stephen Thomas, The Temple
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