The Wolf Can Smell This is My Acre

An old man lies in his hammock flirting with the sky when an Eagle flying over the harpeth river catches his eye. He wonders if he can see from the riverside its nest high in a tree on top of the bluff and slowly walks, staff in hand, across a pasture and down a cedar-crowded hillside to the river bottom. He scares three wild turkeys and a young whitetail buck, but a horned owl just watches him, silently.

"Quirky, mysterious, and mystical, Klyd Watkins awakens us to the talking of trees to each other, the talking of birds in love, all of nature talking. To each other and to us. Hoy Dia! He's talkin hawktalk."

-Sharon Edens Doubiago, author of Psyche Drives the Coast

"Klyd Watkins makes the reader feel all of a sudden that the ordinary is a swirl of strangeness, charm, color and charge that habit has just barely kept from exploding into its proper mythic dimensions."

-Stephen Thomas, author of Journeyman

"I pick Klyd's poems up to be in the luxury of his moments, to experience them and then enjoy the long after spell of excellent detailling of and in his landscape; his lexical dexterity is perfectly timed. An excellent deep read."

-Karl Kempton, aurhot of poems about something and nothing

Klyd Watkins has lived most of his life in Tennessee, except for teaching through the seventies at Madisonville Community College in Kentucky. He has also worked as a realtor and a honky tonk country bass player.He and his wife Linda live now on the Harpeth River near White Bluff, with three of their four sons living nearby (the fourth is in LA, working for Disney). His five grandchildren are scattered around the country, but all three of his great-grandchildren live next door, making it convenient for him to attend their ball games.He started publishing poetry throughout the late sixties and seventies in regional poetry magazines such as Red Clay Reader, Southern Poetry Review and Poem. His first publication was in The Fisk Herald. During the seventies, he interrupted his writing to make poetry on tape recorders, working alone and doing simultaneous improvisations with Linda, and with Peter and Particia Harleman, and with Toby and Ginny Tate. This work appeared on the series of lp's called Poetry Out Loud (numbers one through ten) and on the CD, One Foot in the Garden. The Poetry Out Loud albums are now for sale on iTunes and are still collected by vinyl lovers. The availability of recording equipment around the house stimulated his sons, who all became accomplished musicians. He was active in the Nashville open mic scene back in the days of The Windows on the Cumberland readings and in C Ra McGuirt's "Dreadful House" salon. Nashville poet Joe Spears fortuitously suggested he submit to Charles Potts's The Temple, the Walla Walla, Washington poetry magazine and publishing complex, where he would publish frequently over the years. Eventually his collection The Wind is Sacred There: a Journal of Radnor Lake was published by Potts's press, Hand to Mouth.Fresh inspiration from the move in 2017 from Nashville to the land on the harpeth produced the poetry in this book.

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