New York: Penguin Books, 2020. 112 pages. $20.00.
“I don’t know when it began, / the will to sort moment / from moment,” writes Joanna Klink at the outset of The Nightfields. This drive to separate one moment from another recalls Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, in which Woolf states that “[e]very day includes much more non‐being than being.” Whatever we consider authentic “being” to be, poetry can provide a vessel for rejoining it—especially poetry that refuses all but the most direct line to what is essential. This is what Klink accomplishes here in her beautiful fifth book, as she recalls the most elemental and fleeting gifts in our ephemeral lives: “Because we live we are granted / names, streams, shocks of / heat, murmuring summers.”
Klink’s will to sort moment from moment is also a drive to “live consciously,” in Woolf’s terms. The Nightfields shows the searing nature of such consciousness, as Klink’s voice moves through pain and abandonment, elegy and self-criticism. Her poetic gestures are unsparing, her “arms / just a motion in the great / soundlessness of sky.” Her affinity for the lyric sequence shows a profound sense of poetic closure and its relationship to loss: by its very nature, the poetic sequence re-enacts multiple closings under one thematic or formal umbrella. The Nightfields features four sequences of varying lengths; the book also contains other poems whose stanzas are separated by asterisks and short lines, symbols that extend and harden a stanza break’s act of division.
Throughout stanza and sequence, the speaker of these poems navigates an abstract yet vividly material plain. She confronts interlocutors both human and nonhuman, always ruminative yet never wavering from the unmistakable sound of vatic authority. We sense this voice’s serenity was hard-won from the turbulence of its birthright. And the status of the self itself is also up for speculation: “Who is ever at home in oneself.” This locution of question-as-statement occurs often in the collection, as if grief and loss have muted earlier life questions into destinies: “Who will look out for you now.”
This lyrical language is wrung from everything extraneous. In the words of Henri Cole, Klink is a landscape poet “who draws more than paints.” The natural world is indeed crucial to The Nightfields (and throughout Klink’s work), almost in the way that Eliot explained his concept of the “objective correlative”: “[W]hen the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” For example, Klink’s second poem, “On Falling (Blue Spruce),” makes a fallen spruce an emblem for the loss that will trace throughout the book. The spruce’s death is chillingly transformative: “I think / as it fell it became // unknowable.” This terrible change is intensified by the stanza break before “unknowable”: the break provides a magnified, almost Dickinsonian “Element of Blank” before the tree reaches the ground and becomes utterly other than what it had been upright, its ninety-year-old roots “ripped / and sprung” by a windstorm.
In Cole’s words, Klink “draws” not only landscape but also emotional experience. As a reader, I felt myself connecting with her on the starkest of levels. Even poems referencing particular relationships such as “A Friendship” and “Cancer (Prayer For My Father)” uphold the collection’s contract: a commitment to poetry that is “autobiographical but not personal,” as Klink herself has described Louise Glück’s work. (A sequence called “The Devotions” also sounds notes of homage to the Matins and Vespers poems in Glück’s The Wild Iris.)
In one of the most ravishing poems in The Nightfields, the ekphrastic “Statue From Antiquity,” we can see the power of such emotional impersonality. Addressing an “anonymous” Roman statue, Klink shows that anonymity does not preclude connection. She connects to the statue not only by resisting surfeits of detail but also by rejecting the hyper-scholarly approach to classical art that the ekphrastic genre sometimes invites. Instead, Klink almost uncannily dives into the statue’s immanence:
I understand it is neither memory nor future
that turns the wild composure of your face.
And it is more than your eyes,
scorched to blanks from dust storms
in the desert, the rain
blown in folds against your dress.
Klink’s understanding is not scholarly but lyrical. It is substantively “more” than what we might chronologically define as memory or future. The paradoxical “wild composure” that “turns” the statue’s face, the scorched eyes-as-blanks, and the rain in folds against the dress (rather than the folds of the dress itself): all of these phrases show a centripetal approach that nevertheless cuts deeply into the immediacy of the long-weathered artifact. Klink is an empathic seer who gleans pertinent physical detail—and no more than that—even while making room for the abstractions that bring her closer to the ancient girl.
Klink’s ability to see deeply into things, whether in the made or natural world, is unusual for a poet who mines emotional experience with such relentlessness. She continually shows us that watching the self does not preclude watching the world:
As one thing is entrance unto another
the birch tree is a pleat, a curtain, a crop—
a cloud of thunder unwinding in dark silver,
leaving behind the day-ordered world, declaring
This region you live in is more than yours
More than what you have lost in your lifetime.
More than you could ever hope to gain.
This tripartite list of metaphors for a birch (“a pleat, a curtain, a crop”) becomes an “unwinding” thunder cloud after the dash, offering consolation for our own fundamental separation from the natural world. Thus “This region you live in is more than yours” is self-solace for a voice that, as Klink says elsewhere, “never felt at home.” Georg Lukács thought the novel was a site of “transcendental homelessness”; here, Klink suggests that his description applies to the lyric poem as well.
The Nightfields begins and ends with poetic sequences titled “The Infinities” and “The Night Sky,” respectively. True to their titles, both sequences reach beyond the limitations of a single human life. This bookending not only provides a satisfying circular structure—a cocoon for the book—but also a portal to freedom within human insignificance or what Milan Kundera once called “the unbearable lightness of being.” According to Klink’s notes, “The Night Sky” was inspired by the landscape artist James Turrell’s Roden Crater, “an extinct volcano in the Painted Desert of Arizona that the artist is transforming into an observatory for the perception of time.” In this closing sequence, time becomes short blocks of poetry, almost as if constitutive of lyric seconds that simultaneously span millennia. Set against “[b]lack sky soaked with ghost-violet,” Turrell’s astronomical project enables the human figure, in stolen moments, to reside in brief concert with the universe. In these “moments of being,” Klink accesses the possibilities that our small lives afford us—what the book promises even through its grief. “Gorgeous wager of our lives: it is still there,” Klink writes. And ultimately: “Carry yourself into sky. Your life is open to you.”