Precarious Lives

Precarious Lives, Jean Watkins’ second collection, celebrates the diversity of wildlife, landscape, art and human experience. Events and lives are described in sensuous detail. Throughout, the poet is conscious of our tenuous hold on life, the perennial threats we face, as well as those more recent ones inaugurated by the coming of climate change.

from reviews of Scrimshaw (Two Rivers Press, 2013):

‘Jean Watkins … illustrates a particular gift for concrete detail with poems so rich in the senses that they seem to lift off the page … This collection also includes a number of poems which have a sparkly ‘stand alone’ quality’ – The North

‘Watkins works our imaginations through our senses and, as with the best short poems, the story is rich in what Roland Barthes called blind field, the white area around a photograph, the world around a poem’ – London Grip

‘Watkins’ sense of detail is sharp, whether describing nature, an urban scene in Reading or family matters. … Make no mistake, these are poems crafted as carefully as the artefacts and heirlooms they sometimes describe … and I am left wanting more’ – The Interpreter’s House

Author Biography

Jean Watkins was born in West Yorkshire and has lived near Reading for many years. She gained a BA in English from Reading University in 2001. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies. She has read regularly at the town’s Poets’ Café and at various venues further afield.