The Auroras: New Poems

“David St. John's work has been distinguished from the start by its intimacy and subtlety, and by a disturbing force, the work of an urgent sensibility and a true ear.” —W. S. Merwin

This long-awaited collection from David St. John is the most provocative, adventurous, and stylistically eclectic work of his career. The beauty, music, and artistry of David St. John’s poetry have been long admired; now The Auroras reveals the extent and breadth of this masterful poetic achievement. Readers of Larry Levis, Dana Gioia, and Phillip Levine will be captivated by this searing, surprising, and sensual collection from one of the world’s greatest poets writing at the height of his talent and insight.
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An exciting, long-awaited collection from the National Book Award finalist, a poet of wild imagination and formidable accomplishment

David St. John's new collection of poetry, The Auroras, is the most provocative, adventurous, and stylistically eclectic work of his career. Composed as a triptych of three distinct movements, it opens with a sequence of urgent, subversive, sensually charged poems, crackling with desire.

In the center section, St. John returns to the California landscapes of his youth, in both the San Joaquin Valley and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. These poems are quiet and measured, yet often psychologically troubling.

The final section of The Auroras is constructed as an album of philosophical and aesthetic meditations, all haunted by the force of an emerging sense of mortality. In this collection, even the most compelling emanations of light—artistic, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual—are inevitably framed by impending darkness.

The beauty, music, and artistry of David St. John's poetry have been long admired; now The Auroras reveals the extent and breadth of his masterful poetic achievement.

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“Expressive, gestural, and image-laden, St. John’s lines fairly hum with the pleasure of their own making.” - The New Yorker (on THE RED LEAVES OF NIGHT)

"It's not just gorgeous, it is go-for-broke gorgeous. It is made out of sentences, sweeping through and across the meticulous verse stanzas, that could have been written, for their velvet and intricate suavity, by Henry James. But that doesn't quite describe them, since they are also full, almost past ripeness, of a floating, sometimes painful, sometimes wistful, intense, dark, and silvery eroticism." - Robert Hass (on STUDY FOR THE WORLD'S BODY)

“Poems…full of magic and light…Essential for readers of contemporary poetry.” - Library Journal (starred review)

“Read these poems slowly because this kind of writing does not happen overnight… THE AURORAS is luxurious whether dealing with the ordinary or the magnificent.” - Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books