Poems for the Twilight

About the Book

Poems for the Twilight is a book of forty poems by Robert E. Watson. They range from grief as in “At a Brother’s Coffin” (which asks, “To what new friends and what strange place / And where in the circling, infinite void of space / Has gone that light which made him feel / Life’s joy and pain and love’s appeal? “) to anger as in “Point of Order” (which asks after the death of a friend and his family in a car accident, “Who was it brought about / This obscene transformation / After so many afflictions? / Was it the Universe Man / With his contract in his pocket?”/ “Or was it moldering nature, / Dragging its corrupted foot and reaching out with decomposing fingers / For the closest throat? With dead eyes / It sees no distinction between the cockroach / And the bleating lamb torn by salivating jaws”). Yes, this book is contemplation in a mystic world.

About the Author

Robert Watson was born in West Baltimore in 1940. He attended the University of Maryland, earning a BA degree in 1964. His love of poetry blossomed, and many of his early poems were written during this time. In 1965 he became associate editor and in 1970 editor and general manager of the Central Maryland News, later the Howard County News. He won nine awards for excellence in journalism from the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association Better Newspaper Contest, including five first-place awards. He earned a master of arts degree from Johns Hopkins University in its exclusive Writing Seminars Masters Program in 1971. He founded Howard Cable Television Associates Inc., which was awarded the cable franchise for the Howard County. A lover of performing arts, he founded the Columbia Arts Council in the early 1970s. He entered the University of Baltimore Law School in 1976, graduating in l978, and moved to Garrett County, where he opened a law practice and married his lovely wife, Rita. They have three children. A noted landscape photographer, he started Pictures Limited, a company organized to market and sell his framed Cibachrome photographs, which were displayed and sold in galleries throughout Maryland. He was elected president of the GC Bar Association, and during his thirty-seven-year practice, he represented the city of Oakland, the Garrett County Sheriff’s Department and the Garrett County Board of Education. In 2009, he received an award for obtaining a BV Peer Review Rating from Martindale-Hubbell, which is “the highest rating a lawyer can achieve after admission to the bar, indicating very high legal ability and ethical standards.” The rating is based solely on peer input. He also served as representative of the sailing fleet of the Baltimore Yacht Club Board and is a licensed single-engine pilot and a certified open-water scuba diver.