Weightless Books

Night Songs builds within its pages an atmosphere Proustian-no, not sentences running the course of many pages; no, not any simply measured loquaciousness. Rather, we find here a poetry concerned with music, subsuming into itself music’s own mysterious sentence as re-appearing theme, a music-like stitch that counters the discursive pleasures of the prose poems by calling the reader’s mind back to what must be, or might be, remembered. Here, too, the night thickens with nostalgia, a form of memory that calls into question itself, revises itself, erases itself, categorizes itself-a music, I’d say, that wants to listen to itself to know its own song, to prove its melody to itself with only itself for evidence. It is a lovingly faulty task undertaken in poems just as lovingly full, lovingly faultless, trusting to the book’s whole composition what no single poem can claim alone-the music entire. -Dan Beachy-Quick

Posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2023 at 12:00 am.