William Welch

“If the world is mysterious,

the truthfulness of the image

consists in carrying within it

a certain mystery as well.”

Andrei Tarkovsky

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Purchase at Finishing Line Press

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”)…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

“Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence…not balances / That we achieve but balances that happen…”

Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” 1.7

We are justified in our beliefs by our awareness that the test of seriousness is not simply our sense of a certain urgency in the poem, or a certain “tone” or “mood,” but our sense of personal movement and change in reading the poem. Our subjective judgement is firmly experiential; that is our verification. For we believe that the function of the poem…is to create us, to extend our beings indefinitely in evolving structures of thought and feelings.

Hayden Carruth, “Seriousness and the Inner Poem”

About

I live in Utica, NY, working as a registered nurse and serving as editor of Doubly Mad, a literary and visual arts journal operated by The Other Side of Utica. My poetry has appeared in various journals, and my first full-length collection Adding Saffron is forthcoming in January, 2025.