Adding Saffron by William Welch

What a pleasure to discover in Adding Saffron a poet with an ear for rhythm and eye for images, poems alive to a world he has us walking through line-by-line. These journeys in Welch’s poems—whether about a mouse in the attic, or a harmonica from WWII, or a vacant lot in Brooklyn where locals are growing vegetables—are always lit by poetic insight and compassion.

–John Balaban, author of Locusts at the Edge of Summer and other books of poetry and prose.

“Maybe there are feelings beyond our range,” says the narrator of “Cain,” a poem in William Welch’s compelling debut collection, Adding Saffron. And if there is a feature shared by the poems here, it is that search for the marvelous beyond the range of the natural world—for a “light we cannot see” or “parts of an hour we cannot count in minutes” (“Nineteen Orchard Street”). It is, perhaps, that time-honored Romantic quest, but one adapted to the twenty-first century, in that its landscapes are mostly domesticated—in this case, the backyards and marshlands of Utica, New York (with occasional forays into Texas, where Welch and his wife lived for several years). It is adapted, too, in the sense that Welch avoids the Scylla of Romantic cliches and the Charybdis of postmodern irony: these poems are searching, probing, and scrupulously honest. “Everything looks strange/the way only the familiar can,” Welch acknowledges (“The Border”), and “The air ought to ripple when we speak, / the way a pond does when it rains” (“Vox, Vocis”). Suffice it to say, these poems ripple, as time after time, elegant, nuanced observation yields to uncanny figuration. Welch uses words the way a dowser uses his wand, seeking out the hidden currents beneath the quotidian. “Pull the thread of my voice through the fabric of your thoughts” he offers in “Apologia.” Adding Saffron presents us with a finely woven tapestry, indeed—one that yields subtle new patterns with each reading.

–Thomas Townsley, author of I Pray This Letter Reaches You In Time (Doubly Mad, 2022)