The Nightfields

Penguin Poets

By: Joanna Klink

Narrated by: Joanna Klink

Length: 1 hr and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

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

Joanna Klink's fifth book begins with personal poems of 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 "Night Sky", 30 metaphysical poems inspired by the artist James Turrell's Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in Arizona that Turrell has been transforming into an open-air observatory for the perception of time. The sequence unfolds as a series of revelations that begin in psychic fear and move gradually toward a sense of infinitude and connection.

©2020 Joanna Klink (P)2020 Recorded Books

anatomy offered to the mind atomized by grief

Anyone who has suffered the loss of a person who framed their future will appreciate how their past, all their associated growth, each point of contact and body part previously ratified by their contact, is subject to the continuing fracture that the tearing away of that frame begins — and this book marvelously records such estranging surprises. We can feel our terrifying atomized loneliness (in which we miss even ourselves) reflected in the images offered.

Then, the questions Klink arrives at for us bring a degree of oxygen and optimism back into our disassembled prisons. We don’t always welcome the space, but we survive it in good company.

These exquisite discoveries having been made and recorded, whether shiv or hope unshied from, the track does not stop. The poet has been wise enough to walk behind reflection, and lets us follow farther: past the lyric lights and into the consolations of philosophy. I rarely find a real difference between the beginning and the end of poetry books, but The Nightfields goes somewhere. It’s worth savoring.

I do wish the good people at Audible would allow for more silence between poems. Perhaps playback should simply come to a stop until the mind is ready for more and directs one of the fingers Klink has kindly reattached to press play.

Consider the work of hands: she does.