Lucinda Watson's THE FAVORITE: Excerpt and Review

Here's Richard Blanco's description of The Favorite  by our newest poet, Lucinda Watson. 

Through poems that are as precise they are free-wheeling, as reserved as they are unapologetic, as private as they are confessional and public, The Favorite recasts the archetypal hero’s journey as a heroine’s journey. Watson tenderly, yet unabashedly, speaks to the allure and trappings of womanhood as she traces its arc from the innocent expectations of a girl, to the fear of a teenager forced to conform, to a fully actuated woman who is self-aware and fully alive with all her past and her future, her pain and healing, her losses and her newfound hopes.

Richard Blanco was Inaugural Poet at Barak Obama's second inauguration.

For a glimpse of Lucinda Watson's ways of thinking, click on this link:  https://lucindaw.wordpress.com/ .

 And here's a sample poem:

 

I’ve Found Her Lost Again


In the dusky, damp hour of summer when wine
is poured and in the distance neighbors
bicker over their barbeque, the husband saying
it’s not his job to clean it and clattering
the domed lid over
five pounds of grade A beef.
The wisteria, desperately holding itself open
to possibility and the dogs roam barking, their
tongues sloppy with grass. The birds, repeaters,
warble from tree to tree, trying to vary their story,
back and forth, back and forth, so bored with each other.
In the yard a pool filled with azure water, an aquarium of
tears, piss, semen, a pure rectangle, a holding pond of life,
there, lying on the surface, on the great,
pink, plasticized, inflatable swan floating unguarded,
there’s a girl. She could be 19 or 70. She’s listening to
the opera of summer, writing a bird libretto, her fingers
holding the minute hand on the clock of time, suspended

by the undercurrent of oboe, she knows she’s different.
She feels every rhythm