The Nightfields

A new collection from a poet who has "made a body of work at once utterly lucid and breathtakingly urgent" (Louise Gluck).

Joanna Klink has won acclaim for poetry of bracing emotional intensity. Her fifth collection begins with personal poems that deal with a specific loss (a tree ripped out by a windstorm, a friendship broken off after decades, the nearing death of parents); other poems take on the cost of not loving fully, or are written from disbelief at the accumulation of losses and at the mercilessness of having, as one ages, to rule things out. There are elegies for friends, and a group of devotional poems. The Nightfields closes with "The Night Sky," a sequence of thirty-three metaphysical poems inspired by the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that Turrell has been transforming into a subterranean, open-air observatory for the perception of time. The sequence unfolds as a series of revelations that begin in psychic fear, in a sense of grief and personal limitation, and move gradually towards a feeling of interconnectedness and limitlessness.